external cross-platform hd

9.2: news.addn/mac/external cross-platform hd:

. a good desktop external hard drive

that is both PC and Mac compatible?

I am looking at purchasing a reliable external hard drive for my MacBook Pro,

but I also want to back up some files from a friend's PC.

Does anyone know of a good desktop external hard drive that can be

used for both OS's without having to reformat for one or the other?

the FrŽdŽric Lejal 2-partition disk:

* partition your disk, and make one parition HFS+ for your Mac,

and the other partition NTFS for Windows.

Mac will be able to read and write the HFS+ partition, and read the NTFS.

Windows will only see the NTFS parition,

with read and write permissions

* read this

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/ ,

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070220150856279 ,

http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

and proceed to installation to have your Mac able to read AND WRITE on NTFS,

and format your external drive in NTFS:

you will be able to share the disk both with Macs and Windows,

even for files bigger than 4Gb

my reply:

. ideas I liked summarized from above:

. purchase the enclosure and disk separately .

. Seagate drives are great, 5 year warranty;

but lacie raid is awesome:

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11142

. for your need of

a general mac drive that also does pc backup,

2 ideas:

. the FrŽdŽric Lejal 2-partition disk (is that timemachine ready?) .

. the Frederik Vande Rieviere NAS idea:

FreeNAS

. a free network-attached storage server,

supporting: CIFS (Samba), FTP, NFS, rsync, AFP protocols, iSCSI, S.M.A.R.T.,

local user authentication, and software RAID (0,1,5),

with a web-based configuration interface.

FreeNAS takes less than 64 MB once installed on

hard drive, CompactFlash, or USB flash drive.[1]

FreeNAS is currently distributed as an ISO image and in source form.

It is possible to run FreeNAS from a Live CD,

with the configuration files stored on an MS-DOS-formatted floppy disk.

There is also a VMware disk image available.

. for a {mac, pc} backup solution on my 8gb usb sd card

I format as fat32, and then for mac files

I use a near-4gb dmg file formatted as Mac OS Extended (journaled)

which I believe gives me better protection from fat32 file corruptions?