“Can a Mac and PC share a network hard drive?”

Sure! Although only one operating system can “own” the drive, it can share that same drive with one or more other OSes.

Let’s say a Windows PC shares one of its drives to the local network; its permission can be adjusted as you like, but in general, any device on that network — Mac, Linux, Android, whatever — will be able to see and use the drive, as long as the host PC (the Windows box) is up and running to provide the sharing services.

It works the other way, too, with other OSes sharing a drive to Windows.

Although this is peer-to-peer stuff, it’s really not fundamentally different from having multiple PCs connected to a full-blown server: the server runs its own OS, but any authorized client, running just about any OS, can access and use the server’s drive space and files.

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