“I have family genealogy files on an HP and a Mac. Will I be able to download from both onto this portable or do I need something separate for each computer?”
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If you download a program called MacDrive (it's free for 5 days) on your PC and format the drive for a Mac on a Mac I think it's (Journaled) you will be able to use it on both with zero issues. That's what we do at my office and haven't had any issues. Other than that you should just be able to drag and drop files from each computer but, I'm pretty sure Mac can't read NTFS. Hope that helps some.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.For either operating system, it's just a storage device. With the Mac, you should "eject" the drive before unplugging it. The files can be read on either computer.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.You could use the same drive on both systems, but for maximum compatibility the disk must be formatted on Windows as FAT32 in order for a Mac to be able to read/write to it. I do this all the time with a flash drive. (Windows can't natively read the Mac file format HFS / HFS+.) One thing that does happen is that invisible files that you can't see on the Mac do show up on Windows computers. Probably a small price to pay.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Our remote designer used Mac exclusively. He downloaded his files onto this disk from his remote location, shipped to us and we downloaded via PC onto our server. Our local designer uses both Mac and PC and he was able work from the disk with either format on this end.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.WD answers this on their own site: https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?h=p1&ID=291&lang=en&p=238 A Western Digital external hard drive can be used on both Windows and Mac OSX. This is useful if a drive is being used under both Operating System (OS) to move files between the two environments. Most WD Drives come formatted in the NTFS (Windows) or HFS+ (Mac) format. For a hard drive to be able to be read and written to in both a PC and Mac computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format. FAT32 has several limitations, including a 4 GB per-file limit. This is a file system limitation that affects both Mac's and PC's, and the only workaround is to format the drive to exFAT. The easiest way to format the drive to FAT32 or ExFAT is by using macOS's built-in Disk Utility or Windows' built-in Disk Management.
I would recommend:
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