FAT32 External Drive?

[steelphantom]

I recently bought a Maxtor 200GB drive and put it in an external enclosure. I'm using it right now, and have formatted it to the MS-DOS Filesystem (I'm assuming that's FAT32). I have been using it for about a week with no issues, but now that I think about it, since it is a FAT32 drive, won't it have to be defragged every so often? Would I be better of formatting it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive? If I format it differently, which type of file system would you guys say is the best for an external drive?

 

[Danksi]

I recently bought a Maxtor 200GB drive and put it in an external enclosure. I'm using it right now, and have formatted it to the MS-DOS Filesystem (I'm assuming that's FAT32). I have been using it for about a week with no issues, but now that I think about it, since it is a FAT32 drive, won't it have to be defragged every so often? Would I be better of formatting it as a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) drive? If I format it differently, which type of file system would you guys say is the best for an external drive?

Depending on what you're planning to use the external drive for?

I have an external drive that's formatted FAT32, for general backups, as I can then connect it to both a Mac and a PC.

However for video editing I'm using another external drive that's Mac OS Extended - reason being that FAT32 has a limit of 4Gb per file, which wouldn't work for video editing files.

 

[grapes911]

If you are going to use it in both a Mac and PC, I highly recommend FAT32. If you are going to use it Mac only, then go to HFS+.

 

[steelphantom]

I'm currently using the drive to store all of my music, video files, photos, ect. Pretty much all of my data except documents and applications are on the external drive. I didn't know about the 4GB file limit; that kind of sucks. Would I ever have to defragment the drive if I leave it as a FAT32 file system?

 

[Danksi]

I'm currently using the drive to store all of my music, video files, photos, ect. Pretty much all of my data except documents and applications are on the external drive. I didn't know about the 4GB file limit; that kind of sucks. Would I ever have to defragment the drive if I leave it as a FAT32 file system?

You may not run into problems with final video files, but for video editing at least files can be much bigger than 4Gb - hence my shift to OSX formatted for my Video-scratch disk.

 

[steelphantom]

If you are going to use it in both a Mac and PC, I highly recommend FAT32. If you are going to use it Mac only, then go to HFS+.

I'm assuming HFS+ is simply the "Mac OS Extended" formatting option in disk utility?

 

[khisayruou]

I'm assuming HFS+ is simply the "Mac OS Extended" formatting option in disk utility?

yeah, you assume correctly.

 

[grapes911]

I'm assuming HFS+ is simply the "Mac OS Extended" formatting option in disk utility?

Yes. Sorry, I should have said that before.

 

[steelphantom]

Yes. Sorry, I should have said that before.

No problem! Everyone here is super-helpful (not to mention super-fast). I think tomorrow I'll reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Will I see any sort of speed boost over FAT32?

 

[grapes911]

No, but..
1. You won't have to worry about defragging or anything.
2. You'll be able to move apps over there and run them.
3. Much higher file size limit.
4. OSX has much better HFS+ support than it does for FAT32

 

[steelphantom]

Well, I reformatted today and everything works fine. Thanks for all your help!

 

[CanadaRAM]

Well, I reformatted today and everything works fine. Thanks for all your help!

Good - now make a Carbon Copy Cloner copy of your OS onto the drive as well, so you can boot from it if everything goes pear-shaped on your main drive.