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getn a new ex hdd.

T

timestoby

macrumors 6502
Original poster
i dont have a mac as of yet,but will switch in months to come.i em now gonna get a new external usb hdd and was wondering if i should put in fat32 for my pc,that way when i switch i can write to it.i now have a ntfs drive and have read on the forums that the mac will read from it,but wont be able to write to it.
so when i get the mac will i be able to watch videos from the ntfs drive?the files are in avi.mkv and music files.

and how much space will the 250 hdd use for fat32?i think i read like 20+ gigs.i could be way wrong tho.
 
In the greater scheme of things, FAT32 won't really take up any more space than NTFS or HFS. Definitely use FAT32 to ensure you can use the drive with PCs and Macs seamlessly. However, one of the drawbacks is that there'll be a limit of 4GB per file. Are any of your movies over 4GB?
 
awww that sucks.i do have some movies over 4 gigs.so wot do people do with files larger than 4 gigs?wot would be my options?
 
macdrive could be an option.i was thinkn that the larger files i download onto the fat32 system,i could transfer to the ntfs drive then watch the larger movie file.would that work? or wont a fat32 files transfer to a ntfs drive?
 
You simply won't get the 4GB file son the FAT32 partition in the first place. Transferring from one format to another is easy. The hitch is in the OS you're using since it's effectively reading one format and then writing to another... A Mac will read from an NTFS drive, but that is all. You should be able to watch your movies but you won't be able to do much else. Perhaps you could split it into a few different partitions for a few different formatting schemes. Then you can just use the one that suits you best. 🙂
 
well i will have two hdds and one is full of movies,so ill just keep that the way it is.at lest i still can watch the movies without a problem(hopefully lol). so can i download the large file onto the mac then transfer it to the ntfs drive then i can watch the larger file.so basically i will have the drive on the mac and two extra drives
 
ohhh right.i guess ill have to look into the macdrive thingy then.well if all else fails ill still have the pc from which i can get the larger movies then transfer onto the ntfs drive,then the mac can read from the ntfs. thanks for ur help
 
Dumb question- but why can't FAT32 address files larger than 4 GB?
Seems like there should be a mac and pc format that can address infinitely large file sizes by now...
 
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