[Keith Henderson: OFF: Questions for techies]

[Jeff Thompson]

> Virtually all external drives come pre-formatted for Windows.  They can, 
> of course, be read by Macs (Macs being clever like that), though I have 
> encountered read-write problems with Windows formatted drives 
> (especially with large file sizes), so I tend to just blitz any new 
> drives when I first plug them in, reformatting them for Macs.

If the drive is formatted for NTFS, you run into the problem that the
Mac can't read it natively, requiring you to find some open source
drivers to read the drive.  Or at least I did, and my effort failed,
so I just reformatted it as FAT anyway, so I could lug it between
my Macs and PCs.

> 
> If you are just storing MP3s/AACs, the file sizes may be small, so you 
> might not run into any problems when plugging a Windows-formatted drive 
> into a Mac.  However, I would investigate the issue in greater depth if 
> you really wanted cross-platform compatability.  (I don't -- I just use 
> my drives with my Macs -- so it hasn't mattered to me.)

I don't have a problem with it ... my FAT formatted drive serves my
Mac's 100 gig iTunes library.  But I convert my FLAC files to AAC
to play in the iPod and then just to play those instead, so I am
not using files that are huge than 20 or 30 megabytes for
something the length of an album side like Jethro Tull's "Thick
as a Brick."

-- J eff