FireWire on HDD and FAT32 Format?

[axirr]

So, i'm looking into buying a 500GB WD My Passport Studio Edition for my 17" MacBook Pro...

I've been reading online that people are having issues with the FAT32 Formatted Passports not being recognized with the FireWire but work fine via USB 2.0...

is there truth to this problem with the FireWire and is anyone else having such issues? I've been all over and see the problem, but no solution or results.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Brad Trent]

I would just stay as far away from FAT32 as possible! At this very moment I am literally spending two days of my life re-transferring data I burned onto two replacement 2TB Fantom drives I got last week because little did I know they were FAT32 formatted...a week later and the bloody drives don't show up n my desktop and my only option is erase, reformat and start over again. And in this particular case, I have to ask...why does Fantom go to the trouble to make a drive like their MegaDisk series look like a mini-Mac Pro with it's cute aluminum case and Mac Pro-like holey front plate...and even heavily market them to Mac users (I got mine from MacMall)...but then format the damn thing FAT32 for PC's...?!! With no warning on the box that you gotta reformat it if you plan to use it on a Mac?!!

The disadvantages of FAT32 far outweigh any advantages, in my less than humble opinion...it's not compatible with most older disk management software and motherboards, depending on the disk size it can actually be slower than FAT16 and most importantly, none of the FAT file systems provide the file security, compression, fault tolerance, or crash recovery abilities that NTFS does!

BT

 

[geoffreak]

I wasn't aware of any Firewire problems with FAT32. I do know, however, that FAT32 is limited to 4GB file sizes whereas HFS has no such limitations.
I used a 1TB external over Firewire before formatting it to HFS when I needed to store a file larger than 4GB. Never once had a problem under the format though.
HFS is actually more stable and resistant to fault than NTFS. NTFS can be read and written to on both Mac and Windows for free though (MacFUSE is a free download).

 

[axirr]

oh, awesome, thanks for the help!

i forgot MACS can write in MTFS. my main issue was that i wanted FAT for it's universal read/write on both platforms because my hard drives are media based.

Thanks for the help!!