320GB My Book by Western Digital

[miTunes75]

I just opened up the box to my new 320GB My Book by western digital. Connected it to my mini, everything is working fine. However, the mini is only reading it as a 298GB. Does this sound right???? I thought that it would read like 308GB or something.

Is there something wrong?

 

[charkshark]

Nothing's wrong. 320 GB SOFTWARE memory should be equivalent to about 298 GB, you're just fine. It's same thing if you've ever noticed with new comps, if you have an 80GB internal HD, chances are there is only about 75 gigs of real memory there.

 

[miTunes75]

also, it's formatted in FAT32. Is that good? Or should I use it as NTFS? I will be using it for mac mini only. However, if my brother comes down from IL and wants some albums stored on it, I'll gladly give them to him (if this matters or not?)

Thanks.

 

[masterapple04]

You won't have much luck with NTFS - Mac OS X can't read it! FAT32 should be fine for everything you need to do.

 

[miTunes75]

great! thanks for the help

 

[lieb39]

Just a little correction.. Mac OS can read NTFS but cannot write to NTFS.

Cheers!

 

[mmmcheese]

Just a little correction.. Mac OS can SOMETIMES read NTFS but cannot write to NTFS.

Cheers!

Hehe...further correction...at least in my experience...of course your mileage may vary...

 

[simontarr]

Sounds good! But I believe FAT32 has a limit to maximum file size.... ~ 2GB I believe. So if you're gonna be wanting to store VOBs or large AVI/MPG files then you could have a problem. HFS would be best, but then you wont be able to share your files...unless your brother has a Mac

 

[ziwi]

Would he be better served to format it as HFS? Say for example he partitioned it to have one part be OS and the other part the backup or scratch portion.