Adding external stroage to wirleless network

[dcoon81]

I was considering adding an external hard drive to my wireless network either by adding the new Maxtor shared Network Drive or adding a regular external hard drive the the network via a Linksys Network Storage Link. I have both windows and Mac OS X on the network, will the drive be available to both if it is formatted for the windows pc or vice versa? Is there any particular way I should setup the drive so it can be accessed by all of the computers?

The windows machines will be running xp pro, and the mac is running 10.3.8

Thanks is advance

 

[bobw]

A network drive would be accessible to all machines on the network, Format it on the PC as fat32 and the Mac will read and write to it.

 

[The Ghost]

Is there any particular way I should setup the drive so it can be accessed by all of the computers?

The windows machines will be running xp pro, and the mac is running 10.3.8.

bobw is correct, of course, but FAT 32 is an outdated file system that has a number of disadvantages. We have a network such as your's and format our externals Mac Extended (journaled) and use MacDrive (mediafour.com), or the equivalent, on our PCs. There is no particular way you need to partition the external, but I would create at least two partitions with one used for a bootable clone of my Mac internal (to provide Mac backup and to provide for easy/fast disaster recovery, etc.). In this regard, you will need a firewire external. I like the LaCie firewire Porsche Design 250 GB very well (much bang for the buck). You can buy any decent external (firewire or USB) and connect it to either a Mac or a PC. If you connect it to the Mac, then you probably will want to use SharePoints (hornware.com/sharepoints/) so the PCs can access it.

 

[riddle]

I'm sure the original poster has long since made his or her decision, but for the benefit of Googlers:

I just learned the hard way about the limitations of the Maxtor Shared Storage II. The FAT32 filesystem has Windows-style restrictions on filename length and character set. Among other things that means that it won't support a normal iTunes library (when I tried to load mine up, maybe 5% of the songs had filenames which were too long for it).

To add insult to injury, when Seagate bought Maxtor they shut down the maxtor.com site that the software links to for documentation -- so you'll be trying to figure out its confusing interface without a manual.

The MSS II won't let you reformat the drive, so switching it to a Mac-compatible filesystem is out.

I'm still researching a Mac-friendly NAS solution. Here's one recent summary on the subject: http://www.bad-seed.org/dwelling/200...-and-mac-os-x/

Price aside, an Airport Extreme Base Station sounds like it should at least solve the filename issue.

Anybody have any other solutions to offer?