Jonathan sent us an e-mail saying:

“I own a SimpleTech 320GB Black Cherry Hard Drive and needed it to run on both Mac and PC for school. I thought it would be pretty
helpful if you made a video showing how to format a disc to run on
all OS’s using Mac OS X.”

First, Here’s why there’s a difference. All data has to be put in a file format that the operating system can read off the hard drive. OS X uses a file format called HFS+ to write it’s data. Windows can’t read or write HFS+ data natively. However, OS X and Windows both can read and write to a format called FAT32, which used to be used for Windows all the way back into the MS-DOS days. Most modern Windows systems use the NTFS file format, which OS X can read, but not write to.

So your best bet for compatibility is FAT32. Here’s how to format a drive as FAT32. First, the Windows way and then the Mac way.

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Originally posted at CNET TV