I am thinking about leaving Windows and picking up an iMac within the next few weeks. I just bought a 1TB external drive that I need to format for me to at least store if not transfer data from my Windows XP PC to my future iMac. My question is this: Can Mac OSX read NTFS volumes, or does it have to be FAT32? FAT32 is less efficient than NTFS and I would rather not have to use that to transition out of Windows into OSX. I will be using a Firewire 400 connection since the WD MyBook 1TB I have purchased does not have a network connection at all.
Thanks for your advice. I may end up using the MyBook as the HW component of Time Machine, which if I read the forums correctly, requires HFS+ in its own partition.