Fully Formatting an External Hard Drive - good idea or no?

[gamestriker]

I have a LaCie 160 GB d2 Hard Drive Extreme Triple Interface and I've been looking to purge it and do a full format (it is currently formatted Mac OS Extended; I want to make it Mac OS Extended Journaled).

I have couple of questions about fully formatting an external 3rd party hard drive.

1) Is it a good idea to fully reformat a 3rd party external hard drive (to something different from the factory default)? I've heard that can cause issues with the drive (fussiness, burning out faster, etc.).

2) It's a 160 GB drive but when its empty I only have 149GB of free space. I know I can't get the full 160GB but will fully reformatting it give me some (at least a few more gigs) of space on it?

I appreciate the help.

 

[Eniregnat]

It won't jack up your drive. I have 4 Lacie 250 Gig drives, all have been reformated by me and everything is working just fine.

You may gain or loose a few gigs, but it won't be aprecable.

 

[spinne1]

2) It's a 160 GB drive but when its empty I only have 149GB of free space. I know I can't get the full 160GB but will fully reformatting it give me some (at least a few more gigs) of space on it?

You should get the same amount of space no matter what format you use, within a little bit of each other. So to answer your question, no.

 

[Counterfit]

You don't need to reformat to enable journaling on a drive. Just open Disk Utility, select the volume you want to enable journaling on, and click the "Enable Journaling" button.