Formatting External Hard Drive

Hi all.

I just purchased an external hard drive for use with my Macbook. The instructions that came with the external hard drive say to reformat it in one of the Apple formats. I happened to be at the local Apple store a few days ago, so I asked one of the guys at the genius bar how to format it, and he said FAT32. Now I'm confused. How have you guys formatted your external hard drives? My Macbook is formatted as it came from the factory (not FAT32). Is the external hard drive suppose to be formatted the same as the Macbook's internal hard drive?

Thanks.

 

He adviced you to format it as FAT32 for compatibility - then Windows computers can also read and write to it should that ever be wanted/needed.

If you will only ever use it with your Mac, format it as HFS I guess. I would keep my options open though and make it FAT32.

 

It really depends on how you want to use it. FAT32 fs lacks things such as permissions, which are needed by *NIX OSs such as OS X. If you plan to run programs off your external drive, than I think it can't be formatted as FAT32. If you want to use it just for data, then FAT32 is just fine. Of course, you might partition it and format each partition with a different fs.

 

My external is formatted HFS+ so it can be bootable. I use MacDrive to allow my Windows PC's to read/write to it.

 

how can he format it to fat32 o r hfs+?

 

Not 100% if Disk Utility can format to FAT32, but I think it can. Wouldn't be surprised if it can at least. That's what you'd use for HFS+ though, either way - just connect it and it will show up in Disk Utility.

 

Is it possible to format an 80 gig external harddrive to fat32 on windows so I can use the harddrive to transfer files from apple to windows? Also, what are the size limitations?

 

Yes that should work. The file limitations are 4GB per file and 124GB discs. I would recommend a different formatter though. The Windows formatter I believe can only format a FAT32 in 32GB pieces, so you would have 2 or 3 partitions. You can get an easy Linux formatter to do it for free as one partition.

 

Don't format to FAT32. If you need to share data with Windows machines, format a small partition to FAT32 and the rest to HFS+. Either that or install a driver on the Windows machine that lets you read HFS+ on Windows (there are several such pieces of software).

File operations on FAT32 drives are a *lot* slower than HFS+ drives in OS X. FAT32 drives don't support certain types of Mac metadata (forks, permissions, etc.) so you can't use a FAT32 drive to make good backups of your Mac software applications, for instance. FAT32 uses space inefficiently. FAT32 is not journaled, meaning if something goes wrong, like a power outage at the wrong time, your data is in a much greater danger of getting lost.

There are so many reasons not to use FAT32. For me, the speed issue decided it.

 

How would I create a small partition to FAT32 and the rest HFS+? Also, are there any free drivers that allow me to read HFS+ on Windows?

 

One more question...is NTFS same as Fat32?

 

NTFS is NOT the same. NTFS is the more secure windows format. Check out MacDrive. Definitely best to format to HFS and use MacDrive on Windows to read the external drive. The cost is minimal and defintiely worth not using Fat32.

 

Wait, does MacDrive allow you to write to NTFS as well?
You can read an external NTFS drive fine, but writing to it... thats another mtter completely.

 

No, MacDrive has nothing to do NTFS. It is for your Windows machine. It allows Windows to read/write to HFS+. Normally Windows will not even see an HFS+ drive, much less read/write to it.