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External HDD. which format option to chose?

Turian.Spectre

Turian.Spectre

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 31, 2010
177
0
I have a 1TB portable Toshiba external HDD. Originally I had it formatted as Mac OS extended Journalled, until I ran into a problem of transferring files to a windows pc at home. So I reformatted it to NTFS-3G with a driver I installed on the mac. However I noticed it transfers files like 4 times slower. Does NTFS suck that bad? (rhetorical)

I am thinking or reformatting back to Mac Journalled and installing MacDrive (which I stumbled upon today on the net) on my windows machine. Would that be faster than my current way or all the same?
 
NTFS isn't the problem. It is NTFS-3G. It is sometimes quite slow.
If none of your files are larger than 4gb format it as Fat32. Both windows and mac can read/write to fat32 with no issues.
 
VPrime said:
NTFS isn't the problem. It is NTFS-3G. It is sometimes quite slow.
If none of your files are larger than 4gb format it as Fat32. Both windows and mac can read/write to fat32 with no issues.
Click to expand...

oh I see. I do have large files on there. HD Movies mostly. Should I reformat it then? I just don't know how fast MacDrive is and buying it to find out it sucks is no fun. Plus all the extra work and waiting for transfers...
 
spinnerlys said:
MediaFour offers a 7-day trial of MacDrive to test it out.
Click to expand...

yup i saw that. I just figured to ask here if anyone has it they may tell me if its good or not compared to ntfs-3g. If I reformat my hdd I have to save all the files from it to my mac which is more than 400gb. I dont want to waste an entire day transferring that over if MacDrive is not any better. And then have to transfer it all back.
 
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