[williamb]

I'm looking into buying a USB-powered back up drive. Will I need to format the drive in a special way (e.g. FAT) to be able to use it on Windows AND Leopard OS?

My USB stick drive work just fine on both Windows and Mac OS X. They are formatted, under Disk Utility, with MS-DOS (FAT).

[williamb]

Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-FreeAg...pr_product_top

[chucker]

The short: there is no ideal solution.

FAT* will let you read and write from both systems, but is rather inefficient and comes with some limitations; for example, files cannot be larger than 4 GB*.

NTFS is much more efficient and has some extra features like compression, but can only be read in OS X, unless you upgrade to 10.6 Snow Leopard, install MacFUSE with NTFS-3g, or get some other third-party NTFS solution.

HFS+ is also more efficient, is very good about keeping itself defragmented. Until 10.6 Snow Leopard, though, there's no compression, and no access at all from within Windows without a third-party solution like MacDrive.

*) For the pedantic: FAT32; 4 GB minus one byte.