Comments on: Moving a 25 GB File From a Mac to a PC

By: Chris Plapp

Chris Plapp — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 15:33:02 +0000

After reading Walt’s column and these comments I wanted to clarify what is actually needed to transfer files between Macs and PCs. If you already own an external HD of any type, you can simply use the Mac Disk Utilty to format the drive as MS-Dos format and you will then be able to transfer files between both platforms. No need to purchase MacDrive. You can format and read/write to any size volume. I have successfully done this with a 2TB LaCie drive.

By: David Husch

David Husch — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 04:27:56 +0000

Your article misses a very important point. FAT32 file format does not allow files bigger than 4G. NTFS file system is not compatible with macintosh and the Mac HPFS is not compatible with Windows. An external hard drive can not be used to move files larger than 4G.

By: Dean Chester

Dean Chester — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:06:18 +0000

You could of used gigabyte ethernet as most new Macs come with it. And also it is quite cheap for a network pci card.

By: Richard Mitnick

Richard Mitnick — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:51:18 +0000

Just for the record, I just copied 25 gigs from my desktop HDD to an external I use with my laptop. I used Firewire 400, 30 minutes and done. Firewire 400 is a tad slower than USB2.0.

I think that this is way faster than ethernet over my network.