Western Digital My Book Studio II - Work with pc AND mac?

[AnimationTrip]

I'm considering a Western Digital My Book Studio II - 2 TB as a backup drive for the PCs and the Mac in our office. Can that drive be formatted so that PC and Mac can both read/write with it?

 

[Alvin.C]

Hi,

Yes. But there's a however.

If you format the partition(s) as fat32, then both Mac OS X and Windows will be able to read/write data to the hard drive.

However, note that if you want to use Apple's Time Machine to backup the Mac system in your office, it requires a partition that is formatted with HFS Plus (journaled).

 

[S0ULphIRE]

The only thing is fat32 is a very BAD format, prone to crashing and won't be able to copy any files over 4gb.

I'd suggest formatting the drive as NTFS and downloading this driver for your Mac. It will allow you to write to the external drive as well as read from it when you plug it into the mac.