My sister is a teacher and has a need to bring home a few GB of data from PCs at school to her Mac at home. Are external HDs or USB sticks generally able to handle being swapped between the two?
I remember trying to use a Kingston pen drive on a Mac that didn’t seem to like how files had been deleted when it was plugged into a PC, so it refused to acknowledge the free space.
As long as the device is formatted as FAT (not NTSF), there should be no issue.
The one confusing thing is that OS X (and *NIX in general) hides files by prepending a ‘.’ to the file name. This results in lots of “housekeeping” files showing up on the PC, whereas they are hidden on the Mac, as they are supposed to be.
They’re pretty compatible, but external HD’s formatted NTFS are by default read-only under MacOS. There are 3rd party add-ons that give NTFS read-write power to MacOS. Old-fashioned FAT32 should be read-write from the beginning, natively supported.
The best one to use is exFAT, but it won’t work on older computers (XP and Vista need a service pack but Win7and later support it natively, and it looks like MacOS needs 10.6.5). If you might be accessing something older, FAT32 will work, but won’t support single files more than about 4GB. Regular old FAT is way obsolete.
Yeah, putting it in a Mac leaves a lot of .DS_Store type cruft when opening in Windows. Android does that period thing, too.
That’s because both OSX and Android are based on some flavor or other of Unix. And you can see those hidden files on a Mac, too, if you have Finder set to show them (which I always do).
If you first use the device on a Mac, it’ll almost certainly work fine on a PC. If you first use it on a PC, it has a decent chance of working right on a Mac, and will almost certainly work at least partially.