Ashley Mulder wrote:
Hi all
doing some research on external hard drives
basically the ole man is looking at getting around 250gig hard drive
I haven't strayed from Western Digital for a few years now. Many
installs and 1 failure.
I must have replaced just about all the other brands by now :-)
in a (preferably) firewire case
Buying the enclosure and drive separately saves money and gives you choice.
They are very easy to assemble. Everything fits just one way ;-)
does it have to be a MacOS formatted drive or can it be a generic type
thats non-formatted or formatted to NTFS (windows)?
Mac can read Windows but the opposite is not true, no surprise there.
(If the drive is ever shared over a network then everybody could
read/write everybody, not sure if this helps you however.)
NTFS:
- Windows XP/2000 - read and write, long file names, indexing support.
- Mac OS X - read only.
FAT32 (MS-DOS File System):
- Windows 98/XP/2000 - see below.
- Mac OS X - read and write, two gigabyte file-size limit. Audio/Video
warning!
FAT (FAT16):
- It seems some thumb/flash drives come with the 'disk' as FAT32 but the
'volume' is FAT. Not good. Disk Utility will rectify this of course.
Mac OS Extended (Journaled):
- Windows - No access
- Mac OS X - read and write, long file names, indexing support.
If its Mac only then Mac OS Extended (Journaled), if its XP/2000 only
then NTFS.
If you want both to access it I suggest getting Disk Utility to
partition the disk in two and use both formats.
This gets around the 'gotcha' of the two gigabyte file-size limit of the
FAT32 (MS-DOS File System) for both OS X and XP/2000.
It is tricky sharing files via external drives because of these issues,
networking can give better results.
what sort of prices are we looking at?
eBay 'Buy It Now' is as good as most market examples.
HTH
Cheers
Paul
P.S. Has anyone tried a Mac to PC network connection using Firewire, is
it possible?
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