Disk Utility
application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window.FAT32
, which (as suggested by Michael Sturm) is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows. In addition to limitation to file sizes < 4 GB, you also lose a lot of nice features on HFS+
such as permissions and journalling. FAT32
partition on the disk along side the existing HFS+
partition. This could be used to move data between the Mac and the Windows machine, but would suffer from all the same FAT32
issues mentioned above.NTFS
or HFS+
to be read on OS X and Windows respectively. On the Mac, this can be accomplished using add-ons related to the MacFuse project. You should choose the filesystem that you plan on using most frequently so that it is as fast as possible and then reformat the disk accordingly. Using additional software like this will probably create a performance hit, but how noticeable it is depends on your usage pattern.