What is the best way to format a Airport Disk?

Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I purchased a Airport Extreme Base Station recently and as well have a Western Digital 500MB My Book drive. I will be using it with the base station but it's not formatted and I wondered which way I should format it. Not knowing better since I have a Windows XP machine I formatted it in NTFS and realized later it won't work with this. It seems I need either Fat32 or HFS+.

Which format is best for me to go with? I know if I use Fat32 unlike HFS+ I can use it directly on a WinXP machine but most of the time if not all I will use it through the Airport Base Station and those few times I won't will hook it up directly to my MBP. When I format what is the best way to go about formatting the drive?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    smaxsmax Posts: 361member
    I'd say just do FAT32. If there's the possibility of unhooking the drive and using it on a computer, it will let you use it with Windows and OSX without buying any extra programs.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    lfe2211lfe2211 Posts: 507member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by markw10 View Post


    I purchased a Airport Extreme Base Station recently and as well have a Western Digital 500MB My Book drive. I will be using it with the base station but it's not formatted and I wondered which way I should format it. Not knowing better since I have a Windows XP machine I formatted it in NTFS and realized later it won't work with this. It seems I need either Fat32 or HFS+.

    Which format is best for me to go with? I know if I use Fat32 unlike HFS+ I can use it directly on a WinXP machine but most of the time if not all I will use it through the Airport Base Station and those few times I won't will hook it up directly to my MBP. When I format what is the best way to go about formatting the drive?



    See my post here (#7)



    http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...68#post1047068





    It's been working flawlessly for about 2 months.
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