portable hard drive

[akaneria]

hi,
i was looking at purchasing this portable hardrive for my business but before i purchase incorrectly, i thought i would check:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500GB...-Powered-Black


i just wanted to get it confirmed by scan or someone whether it would work in both a pc running winxp and a mac running osx 10.4, so that i can interchange files between them both?

thanks

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Your link is broken.

[Englander]

My detective skills tell me that OP linked to: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500GB...-Powered-Black

EDIT: or perhaps not...

[peterb]

Electrically and physically the drive Englander linked to (and pretty much any other USB connected drive) will work with a PC, whatever the make. All mainstream operating systems, Windows, Mac and *nix also support the USB interface, so that is also not an issue. Howver Mac and Windows use a di=fferent file system, Windows natively uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS+ and while there is software available that will allow one machine to read opnther file system, that is not ideal.

However most external hard drives are ready formatted in the original FAT32 filesystem, which IS readable by both Mac and Windows machines. However you will lose many of the advnced features of the two respective operating systems (such as the security featyures, access control etc) when you copy from one of the machines to the hard drive. In simple terms, if you lost the hard drive, anyone finding it would be able to read the contents without any problem.

If that is a concern, you should consider using some form of file encryption system, such as Truecrypt, which is an open source application rthat will run on both Windows and mac operating systems.

[akaneria]

the link is actually this: dont know what happened

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/500GB...ms-Bus-Powered

but thanks for the info

[plaster]

Has anyone else on here tried a portable hard drive? Which brand / model did you use, and did you find it useful or up to any certain level of quality?