I have a new hard drive for my mac. It came mac formatted, but with that format I can’t use it on a PC. Is there any reason not to just format it as an NTFS volume so both macs and PC’s can read it? What are the advantages of having a mac formatted drive?
If you format it as NTFS, you won’t be able to write to it from OS X (and if you’re running less than 10.4, read support may not be there), so it won’t be of much use to the Mac.
You can format it as FAT32, which will work for both Windows and OS X. Practically speaking, the only reason for using something else would probably be to make it bootable for one system or the other — e.g. to boot OS X, it needs to be HFS+.
You could partition it, with some of it as one filesystem and some as another, if you really want to boot from it.
This hint from Mac OSX hints describes the situation in more detail.
Comparison of file systems will provide detailed information on the relative advantages of using different file systems, if you want to know.
Does this article answer your questions?
http://www.macworld.com/2006/07/features/ww_drives/index.php?pf=1
If not, what new questions does it inspire you to ask?
Another good place to find information: the arstechnica Macintosh forum
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/8300945231
Some applications have troubles with non-HFS volumes, since they don’t use the Mac OS Toolbox calls for some of the file handling. Office comes to mind. HFS will handle resource forks transparently – Toolbox or not. Office and others assume you have HFS and use their own I/O routines which sometimes break on filesystems such as UFS. As for NTFS, see the other responses above; this was just another reason to use HFS. Products such as MacDrive will read and write HFS on Windows. If you’re doing virtualization, just use an SMB share.
I wouldn’t worry about this too much for a non-primary drive (it’s not clear from the OP whether this is a replacement or additional drive), since generally applications will go on the primary anyway. You can’t install Mac OS X on an NTFS drive, so this won’t come up in any case.
And in general, I wouldn’t worry about it at all for documents – Apple has discouraged resource forks for more than half a decade now, and enough of the Mac user base uses UFS that I heard pretty quick from my customer base when I released something once that still used them a while back. Even Mac Office reads and writes documents on my non-HFS drives just fine.
I format all my external hard drives as HFS (Mac format), and use MacDrive to read them on my PCs.
Pssst. MacDrive free trial.