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Can you use same external hard drive for Mac and PC?
Want to use one external drive for both your Windows PC and your Mac machine? Windows uses NTFS while Mac OS uses HFS, and they’re incompatible with each other. However, you can format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac by using the exFAT filesystem.
Can you use the same external hard drive for two Macs?
Apple’s built-in Time Machine app makes it simple to back up data on your Mac. You can use the same external hard drive to back up multiple Macs if you wish.
Will any external hard drive work with Mac?
Any external hard drive will work with PCs or Macs, as long as the connectors are there (Firewire, USB, etc.) It doesn’t matter how the drive is formatted out of the box, since you can re-format any way you like. Formatting in HFS (Mac OS Extended) or FAT32 or NTFS-3G can be done with the Mac OS X Disk Utility.
Can you backup multiple Macs on one hard drive?
What is less well known is that you can use a single Time Machine backup drive with multiple Macs. If you have a large disk, you can partition it and use part of it for regular data and part of it for a Time Machine backup. You also can use your Mac with more than one Time Machine backup drive.
How do I connect two computers to one external hard drive?
Connect the drive to one of the computers. Make sure both computers are in a home group or work group. Share the drive so the other one can access it. Then, both computers can use it. 2) Open My Computer, locate external hard drive
Can multiple computers access the same disk at the same time?
It depends at what level you mean by accessing. All current disk interfaces are single host – that is, only one host computer at a time can access them. The old parallel SCSI interface was multi-host, and I have written systems that used this to allow several processors to share the drive at the same time.
You need some additional hardware though. Many modern routers have USB ports where you can connect a USB drive and access it through the network. Also modern operating systems allow you to share a connected drive (internal or external) over the network.
Is it possible to run multiple files on one hard drive?
Short answer yes, but you need to use a cluster file system designed for parallel access. Examples are Oracle clustered file system ocfs. You also need a disk that has dual ports Fibrechannel and SATA enclosures that can dual connect.