THL Toolbox > Developers' Zone > External Hard Drives and How to Format Them
Purchasing and Formatting External Hard Drives for Access by Both Mac and Windows
Contributor(s): Bob Campbell, Steven Weinberger
Type of External Hard Drive to Use
As of December 2009, THL is using G-Technology, Inc. external hard drives. Purchase these from GovConnection (or CDW-Gov) with an LPO through Mick Watson.
Information to order from GovConnection:
2TB G-Raid Gen 4 Storage hard drive
G-Technology, Inc.
Item #: 10356351
Mfr #: GR42000
Formatting External Hard Drives
Always format external hard drives in NTFS format. Windows reads and writes to this natively. Mac OS X reads and writes to it by installing the following free software: 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae/files/NTFS-3G%20for%20Mac%20OS%20X/2009.4.4/NTFS-3G_2009.4.4-catacombae.dmg/download
If you have questions about this software for Mac, see the following page: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/releases.html
You can also consult http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
Arin Bennett, manager of the Digital Media Lab, also suggested this method Jan 2010, but we would have to check to see 1) if a Mac could read the NTFS section of the hard drive and 2) if a Windows machine could read the FAT32 section:
You could partition the free space on your NTFS harddrive as FAT32 which would allow you to save your processed images and read/write on both PC and Mac. That is, you read the images off the NTFS partition and write the new images to the FAT32 volume.