So the mrs's laptop came back from being repaired, and they kindly sent back an extra hard drive for no reason at all... !
Being a cheapskate & wanting to take advantage of it, I got one of these hard drive docking stations.... was only a tenner.
But I'm struggling to format it to be able to be read by Windows, Linux & PPC Mac & Intel Mac. Basically, I want to use it as a portable drive for all my audio samples so I can just plug it in to any USB, but it needs to be compatible with all those OS so I can use it at any of the studios and be able to read/write onto it with any of those OS.
So what do I need to do? I've erased everything off it so it's just blank atm.

exFAT is what I'd go for. Although make sure you format it to exFAT using a PC or it'll be locked to Mac only. If formatted on a PC then it'll give you read/write from both OS.

Either fat or ntfs should be readable by any os, especially fat32 but you'll need to use lower partition size than usual

With NTFS I believe Mac's can only read and not write,

They can be made to write, but you'd need to install a 3rd party driver each time. Fat is definitely the way to go. Although exFAT and not FAT32 so you don't get stuck with 4GB file size limits.

I've got a 2010 macbook pro, it can read and write to ntfs no probs at all on external usb and also internal win dual boot .
I don't recall having to do anything special other than have boot camp installed

andyh wrote:
NTFS doesn't work on a PPC Mac.... it's a pain in the arse. I tried some 3rd party software for it which worked but it expired.
So I've formatted it using Windows but it only gives me the option to format it as NTFS or exFAT... so I've done as exFAT but the PPC Mac doesn't recognise that either! ffs. How do I format it as FAT32?

Sorted it. I formatted it in disk utility on the PPC to MS-DOS file - which it doesn't tell you is the same as FAT32.
Reading/writing now.
Cheers for the replies.

Yeah exfat is fairly new Linux doesn't support it at kernel level yet, needs fuse iirc.
Anyways, forgot you had the ppc in which case fat32 is the only choice