Having ordered my MacBook Pro 15" 2.4GHz, I decided to pick up a good external harddrive with which to lug around data from my home PC to my new laptop. I settled on the purchase of a 160GB Western Digital Passport and noticed that the drive has been formated using FAT32. I've run into issues with file sizes in the past on FAT32-formatted drives, so I'm tempted to reformat the HDD to NTFS. Some quick Googling revealed that Mac OS X offers only limited support for NTFS, allowing users to read from NTFS-formatted drives; but not write to them. And now my question:

How should I format this harddrive for support in both Microsoft Windows operating systems and Mac OS X? It seems that there is a workaround that can allow Mac OS X to write to NTFS drives, but the mounting procedure is a bit more of a chore than I'd like to go through. (http://www.hackszine.com/blog/archive/2007/06/howto_readwrite_to_ntfs_drives.html) What do you guys suggest? I intend to run Mac OS X alongside Windows XP / Vista, and I have some files on my home computer that can't be squeezed onto my FAT32-formatted drive.

Perhaps it was a lousy choice to go with the USB 2.0 standard on the external harddrive, but I thought that a FW/USB2.0 combo drive was a little superfluous. Should have thought that one through better!

MacDrive seems like a solid choice, except for the fact that I'll have to install MacDrive on all Windows-platform computers that I end up using in order to read the HFS+ drive.

Thanks for the prompt responses. I'll likely go the MacFUSE + NTFS route to avoid having to unRAR large files when they need to be used in Boot Camp.

Any word about Leopard and NTFS support?

TechnoDude94, your external HDD has been formatted in FAT32. Try dragging a file over 4GB in size onto it, and you'll find that it won't work.