Help regarding external HArd drives

[dhez]

Hi Guys,

Im planning to get a 1TB new external hard drive, I want to know the following:

1) Whats the difference between FAT32 file system and NTFS?
2) Will the hard drive read on both my apple macbook and sony laptop?
3) What is Raid 1 (Mirroring), and how do you do it and what are the benefits?
4) Im gonna buy a western digital 1TB studio, is it good?? Apparently this comes prefomated for mac what does that mean and do i have to change it to use it on both mac and sony?

Any other things I should know?

Thanks guys

 

[!!DV!!]

If you are planning to use the Drive with a Windows Only setup FAT32 Will not be an option for you. Windows will not format a partition larger than 32 GB.

You need more that One drive to run RAID 1

 

[dhez]

ok im confused, if i wanna store photos music and videos on the drive and want to use it on both my mac and windows what do i do?

 

[shadow_man]

Fat32 doesnt recognize big drives - ntfs however does - so format it as ntfs and it will run fine with the windows laptop, not sure what file structure mac uses but I see no problem in it detecting and running an ntfs drive, after all linux does that well enough and is ext3.

Raid - dont bother - waste of time. As was stated earlier raid is for MULTIPLE hdd's not just 1 and for the slight performance boost I would not take the risk of having something bomb out on you.

Edit: according to apple forums if you format it as ntfs then it will be read only on the mac (no writing to disk from the mac machine) wheres if you format it in HFS (mac file system) it will not be visible to the windows machine without 3rd party software....

More info on that in here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6530162&tstart=0

So NTFS = no write from mac box - read only, full read/write windows

HFS = no read or write from win box without 3rd party software , full read/write osx etc

full read/write on ntfs doable in mac via something like macfuse (a kernel extension that permits loading of user-space filesystem drivers) and the NTFS-3G driver for it, which provide a fully read-write NTFS filesystem for your Mac

Meh just read the link provided im getting tired and probably not making sense.

J

 

[Rocket-Boy]

My recommendation would be to get a network based hard drive, they are not much more expensive than the normal ones and they mount as samba shares so they should be readable from mac and windows, you can also FTP to it from any platform.
Look at the Iomega StorCentre network hard drive.

 

[dhez]

thanks guys for all your help, much appreciated!

what if i just leave it as fat 32?

 

[Asha'man X]

@ dhez

Hi there. The only good thing that FAT32 ever did was provide cross compatibility between operating systems.

Like !!DV!! said, it's limited to 32 gigs under Windows 2000 and later when you create it. You can access a larger size, but only if it was formatted by Windows 98.

FAT32 also won't accept files bigger than 4gb, so any dvd copies may not fit. Not to mention the system is more error prone that NTFS.

Unfortunatley, using a Mac does complicate things. So as Rocket-boy said, try to get a network based enclosure. Will let every operating system access the device.

 

[dhez]

hmmm, please xplain how it is error prone?? will i lose data?? wil the drive crash easier??

i want to connect this hard drive to my ps3 also

 

[ProAsm]

If its FAT32 atm, leave it.
I only use FAT32 on all my drives.
FAT32 is seen by most operating systems.
The only downside of FAT32 is like AshamanX says, you are limited to a max of approx 3.6 gigs per file size which could hinder you if you have large movies.
The other downside with FAT32 is if you store many small files as it has a cluster size of 32k, 64k above 320gig compared to a NTFS cluster of 4k regardless of disk size.
If you get a virus on FAT32 that wont clean up, which happens, you can boot a stiffy or USB stick to MS-DOS and fix it, try that on NTFS
Leave it FAT32, you can always convert it later if need be without loosing your data, but of course once NTFS you cannot go back.
However, Vista I believe wants to see NTFS only but then Vista sucks!
I'm also interested to know how FAT32 is prone to errors.

 

[dhez]

thank you very much proasm, i really appreciate it!

i also read that the ps3 only reads fat32 drives!