On Nov 8, 2011, at 1:48 AM, LuKreme wrote:
> > On 07 Nov 2011, at 19:23 , Chris Murphy wrote: > >> If you're going to attached USB flash storage you might as well just stick >> with FAT32 and then you've got read/write support built into the router, and >> also if you need to yank it and directly plug it into a Mac. > > This has actually become a real problem recently. FAT32 doesn’t support files > over 4GB, and those files are common enough (DVD images, HD movie files) that > FAT32 has become useless for me. However, there is no other alternative that > works cross-platform. exFAT is effectively FAT64 and is cross platform. Support was added circa 10.6.6 I think? It's certainly in 10.6.8. I'm not sure whether router based linux distros are supporting exFAT, though they could. If the router's USB attached storage is effectively a NAS implementation, and you're willing to give up cross platform support for directly connecting the storage to a Mac, you can format it ext3 or ext4 or whatever the router supports. The Mac wouldn't care so long as the storage is accessed through the router. And you'd get over the FAT32 file size limit. > HFS support in windows is nonexistent without a rather flakey and expensive > bit of software ($50 or $70). NTFS support in OS X is similarly flakey and > expensive (€25) and glacially slow. Sadly, most routers with USB for hard > drives either only support FAT32, or only support FAT32/NTFS. > > OS X supports xfs, but I didn’t have good look under 10.6 with it. Besides, > my router support ext2/3, FAT32, and NTFS, so it wouldn’t help anyway. I have not found any support, built-in or otherwise, for XFS on Mac OS X. > > Add to that the simple fact that the interface on the routers is dead-slow, > and you will probably find that you don’t want to hook a drive up anyway, > unless it’s to an Apple base Station (these seem to have comparatively dent > drive performance). I personally think a NAS is the way to go for any appreciable storage. And just make sure that it supports Time Machine, which means it has the version of Netatalk that supports AFP 3.3. Ideally the NAS would already contain a build of Netatalk 2.2.1 which is the latest. Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ MacOSX-admin mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-admin
