Just another little tidbit I thought of. If you really need to quickly and easily transfer files from one to the other (which, honestly, if you're an art student and need to work in both formats you'll be doing this a lot) you might wanna consider getting a thumb drive. As far as I know you don't need to format those and they connect quickly and easily and are a LOT more portable than a HD enclosure. Plus nowadays they are getting to sizes of around 8 and 16 GB's and higher, so they should work for anything you'd need.

 

oh i've got a 2GB flash drive, i just want a big one for my whole My Documents folder (lolthast like my entire life)

 

I know whatcha mean man. The HD in my old comp died and I didn't have any of it backed up really. Quite a few years of my life were on that thing. Oh well.

 

The problem with big flash drives (like the 16GB ones) is that they are quite expensive. I don't think that the file format should be a problem if you are transferring files from a PC to a Mac since if you can read data, you should also be able to copy it. I could be wrong since I'm no Mac expert either.

 

File formats aren't really much of a problem anymore. they used to be a long time ago but it was mainly because Windows and Mac OS were so seperated. Now you can get most windows programs for Mac so its not as much of problem. Here and there you'll run into problems but it's probably about as good as you're gonna get now.

 

Haha...get used to it. I was an avid Mac hater all through college and now that I have to hang out with a G5 for 40 hours a week they just...aren't...so...bad... They're majorly clumsy to navigate until you get used to how it's all set up and you learn how to work with the shortcuts like Expose. Once you get that figured out it's a breeze, and working with a lot of files is pretty easy.

If you do your schoolwork on a computer in a lab at school I'd just use the flash drive. Come home and dump all the files into a backup folder on your desktop and then if it gets lost or busted up you're not SOL, plus, you can easily work between Mac/PC with little to no compatibility issues. I think you said you had one, if not, I saw 1gig drives at Target for like $20 (I paid $200 for mine right when they came out [:@] )

One note about the Macs though, they're going to make a folder on your flash drive called .Trashes. You can only see it on PCs, and I didn't find this out until I was swearing at the computer in the lab one day because my drive was full but I only had a few small files on it. I don't know why it's there, but it's good to know in case you run out of room on the drive

 

oh im not hating at all, im kinda anxious to learn how to use them, im really excited to start editing videos on it

 

it's pretty easy

when you get the drive, it'll be formatted to work with a PC (NTFS).

you can read/write to it from windows

when hooked to the mac, you will see the drive as read only. so it'll act like a huge cd. you can copy the files off of it, but you won't be able to put files on it

downfall to this. all files you bring from drive to mac, will be read only, so you won't be able to edit them until you make them writable again on the mac.

fine for music, but a total PITA for other things.

you can pm me if you want specifics for how to format the drive using the mac to make it so you can go back and forth with no issues (outside of not having files bigger than 4gb)