If you have a large external hard drive that you wish to share between your Mac and Windows machines, you’ll find yourself in a dilemma: Windows offers no support for Mac-formatted (HPFS+) drives, while Mac OS X, out of the box, offers only read-only support for NTFS, the default file system for Windows XP and beyond. Mac OS can, however, read and write FAT32 volumes. The only problem is, you can’t easily format a hard disk over 32 GB as FAT32 (at least not under Windows XP) without additional software. (That additional software, by the way, is called Fat32Format, which is free.)

Recently I found out that Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard actually has native (built-in) write support for NTFS. The catch is, write support is disabled by default. There are a number of command-line methods of enabling write access. You can also download and run a simple, free software program called iNTFS. You have to run it once (from the disc image; no install required).

I recently installed iNTFS and found that it was simple and worked instantly. You do have to unmount (eject) and remount any NTFS drives you have before you can write to them. So far it works fine and I’m happy with how easy it was to do.