fat32 drives and OSX

[dropscience]

^ I see... and now that makes sense because whenever i write to my SanDisk Cruzer on the Powerbook it puts a "trash.stor" file onto the drive. I see this file when I plug it into the PC.

 

[mkrishnan]

^ I see... and now that makes sense because whenever i write to my SanDisk Cruzer on the Powerbook it puts a "trash.stor" file onto the drive. I see this file when I plug it into the PC.

Yes, these additional files are written to allow some of the OS X features to work on the volume. There is also a .ds_store or something like that which OS creates inside folders, I think. I should probably discuss that in the guide. 😱

 

[zoran]

2.) You can't format a FAT32 drive bigger than 32GB in Windows. I used a DOS utility to format my 250GB external to FAT32. Not sure if OSX can do it, but I don't see why not.

So its Windows that will not let a drive over 32gb to be formatted or is it the specs of fat32 that disallow it? What if i try to format a hd in fat32 on OSX?

 

[robbieduncan]

So its Windows that will not let a drive over 32gb to be formatted or is it the specs of fat32 that disallow it? What if i try to format a hd in fat32 on OSX?

It's later versions of Windows. Windows 98 will do it (iirc) but NT based version won't (Windows 2000 and XP). This appears to be due to Microsoft wanting everyone to use NTFS for their drives (but as memory cards tend to be FAT based they allow you to format them and 32Gb seems to be a reasonably limit for flash memory!).

 

[skipsandwichdx]

Yeah, it just won't let you in XP. Never tried it in OSX, but I see no reason why it wouldn't let you. Actual max volume size for FAT32 is 2TB.

 

[nplima]

Ext2

As more and more people have several computers at home and at the office, it woul dmake sense to find some standard that makes file transfer workable. At this point, FAT32 is the "least common denominator" however it has obvious problems, like the big file issue and the waste of space when you have many small files in a big partition.

I've been using EXT2 partitions (www.fs-driver.org) on my windows box for everything but the operating system files and it works great. As soon as I have time to try out the OS X counterpart (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/), I'll be able to trust my files to these "forever-beta" add-ons. It's too bad that both Apple Computer and Microsoft are so keen in pushing their own products instead of supporting a proper standard.

I guess that the solution for the long run will be to keep NAS handy... 😛

 

[yellow]

I've had worries about the OS X version, for a while the support there had ceased to exist and it looked like the project was dead in the water, but they do appear to still be working on it. Thanks for bringing this back to my attention!

For those who don't know, ext2 is associated with Linux and other UNIX-like OSes.

 

[mkrishnan]

Well, as with the discussion of ZFS, it's quite possible that Apple will move to an open standard at some point. I don't know if WinFS will ever see the light of day, but I would not hold my breath *cough* Metro *cough* that Microsoft ever will.

However, when it comes to service on the network, it doesn't really make that much difference. I mean, if the file system supports Unix permissions and ownership, and it gets served from a computer that supports it, it doesn't really matter to the user on the Mac what the filesystem on the server is. That's the core concept of NAS. The problem really is most severe when you're using removable media that gets mounted on multiple computers with different FS's.