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What format..

C

CNU182

macrumors regular
Original poster
do i have to use in order to be able to use my external 250gb hard drive with both windows and mac os 10.


thanks
 
*cringes* - FAT32. but i don't recommend it. Mac OS X, or atleast on intel macs, can read NTFS if that's all you need on the mac side, but no write support, and you need MacDrive for windows to use HFS+. but with FAT32... expect problems if you do any kind of heavy data mangling.
 
"heavy data mangling", what do you mean by this, I use Fat32 between my computer and OSX should I change it? And this program, will it let me read data and write data between pc and mac and have the Mac organization (wutever it's called, Fat 32, NTFS ect.).
 
FAT32 is limited, slow and is prone to corruption, which is why it has been deprecated in favor of NTFS for Windows installs.

That doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that when it breaks it's ugly.

B
 
Rapmastac1 said:
"heavy data mangling", what do you mean by this, I use Fat32 between my computer and OSX should I change it? And this program, will it let me read data and write data between pc and mac and have the Mac organization (wutever it's called, Fat 32, NTFS ect.).
Click to expand...

To put things in perspective you have to remember how old FAT32 is....didn't it come out with Win95? Most modern filesystems have journaling for file protection nowadays.
 
pizzach said:
To put things in perspective you have to remember how old FAT32 is....didn't it come out with Win95? Most modern filesystems have journaling for file protection nowadays.
Click to expand...
And also remember that FAT32 is just a hack of the original floppy file system MS developed for DOS way back when (1981). They've just extended it from 12 bits to 16 and then 32 to handle larger discs and files.

B
 
Unfortunately FAT32 is the universal file system. Sure it may be limited and no complex, but that's basically why everyone has implemented it too.
 
whenpaulsparks said:
*cringes* - FAT32. but i don't recommend it. Mac OS X, or atleast on intel macs, can read NTFS if that's all you need on the mac side, but no write support, and you need MacDrive for windows to use HFS+. but with FAT32... expect problems if you do any kind of heavy data mangling.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I get nervous with large partitions in FAT32. Besides the fact that it isn't the most robust filesystem in the universe, it's also terribly inefficient on large partitions. Essentially, all FAT systems break down space into clusters which are in proportion to the size of the partition, and are the smallest possible unit of allocation. As the partition size increases, so does the size of each cluster. Since even a file only 8 bytes in size will use an entire cluster, you could be wasting a heck of a lot of space.

Personally, I've stumped up the cash for Mediafour's MacDrive software so that my Windows system can read and write Mac HFS+ formatted partitions. It's been absolutely rock solid in over 2 years of use. I get full compatibility and performance in Windows, whilst keeping all the advantages of HFS+ (journalling, metadata, sensible file allocation).
 
Ext2...

Mac OS X, or atleast on intel macs, can read NTFS if that's all you need on the mac side, but no write support, and you need MacDrive for windows to use HFS+
Click to expand...

For some time there has been NTFS read only support in some Linux distributions, while full support is harder to get because the NTFS specification is a MS trade secret. I don't know about OS X but under linux, the use of NTFS is experimental and not recommended for more than file recovery prior to re-instalation of a broken OS...

On the other hand, since the specification for EXT2 is open for anyone to use it, there is a kernel driver for Windows XP to use EXT2 partitions. I've been using it for a couple of months now and it works.

http://www.fs-driver.org/

If the demand is there, I'm sure it would be possible to make a OS X version of it, which IMHO would be much more interesting than to extend the use of NTFS from Windows to other operating systems.

So, FAT32 is a good example of what the user gets when stubborn people keep forcing their own proprietary solutions instead of an open, freely available anternative... :-/
 
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