Questions About Partitioning Drive

[greenguy4]

I have some questions about partitioning a MyBook Essential 750 I just purchases and I havn't been able to find the answers in the forums

1. Adding the fdisk support--for making the drive also work with windows. Is their a downside to doing this? Does it slow the drive down on the Mac. I will primarily use this drive with my iBook but maybe if I lend it to a friend with a PC?

2. Apple Partition Map or GUID Partition Map--I am going to purchase a new laptop in the next year, will I have to remake the partition map?

3. Journalling or not? Is it safer to use journaling, and does it take up a lot of room?

I will be using this drive mainly for movie storage and as a backup drive.
Thanks for the help!

 

[logana]

Assuming you are using OSX 10.5

1. Create 2 partitions - one for Windows (MS-DOS - FAT32) and one for Mac.
It will not slow down anything on the Mac side. FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit. If you want to format to NTFS you will need to use Windows.

2. GUID partition map is only needed if you want to boot an Intel Mac from the eternal drive. If you think that will ever be a possibility them GUID format it.

3. The normal Mac system is journalled - I have never had any problems using journalled....

 

[greenguy4]

I'm actually using 10.4.11 what does this affect?

So the Windows partition would not be accessible when booted to OSX? and vica versa?

 

[logana]

10.4.11 will not really be any different....

Yes, you will be able to "see", read and write to the Windows partition in OSX if you format to FAT32. If you format (under Windows) to NTFS you will be only be able to read from it - not write (or rename the partition).

If you format it to NTFS you will have to use some Mac utilities (some free, some not) to read AND write to the partition under OSX.

 

[greenguy4]

So the only reason why I shouldn't make it all Fat32 is the file size limitation--everything else is the same?

 

[logana]

So the only reason why I shouldn't make it all Fat32 is the file size limitation--everything else is the same?

It will probably come from the factory as FAT32 - you can use it with 2 FAT32 partitions if you want.

Windows works "more efficiently" with NTFS and Mac OSX with HFSJ (OSX journalled)....You won't really see much difference used on USB2 since the speed of the hard disk read/writes will be limited by the USB2 transfer speed.

If you are never going to use file sizes above 4GB then yes one FAT32 partition will work...You can use it with Mac and also on Windows (even Vista) without any problems...however FAT32 is the most basic and least efficient of all the formats mentioned and the most likely to become corrupt.

You takes your choices......