what format shall i use for my 16gb pen & 500gb and 1tb HD?

[volcom883]

hi,
just got a mac. yesterday i found out that bigger than 4gb files cant be transferred to a FAT32 format 16gb pen drive.

i am new to the FAT, FAT32, NTFS formats.

i heard that mac will have limitations with NTFS drives.

basically i would like to be able to use my 1TB HD with my mac only and my 500gb HD and my 16gb pen drive with both mac and windows.

what formats shall i convert them into?
or shall i convert them all into NTFS and constantly use paragon ntfs for mac software?
what format do mac uses?

by the way i am kinda surprised to find out that nobody has been able to sort this format issue out yet!

 

[miles01110]

Apple uses HFS+, or "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" in disk utility. You'll want to format your 1 TB drive as that.

You can format the other two as NTFS and use Paragon or any of the other solutions for reading/writing to this format in OS X.

 

[Mal]

If you only need them to work on a Mac, use HFS+ (Mac OS X Extended). If you need them to work on both OS X and Windows, use MacFuse and NTFS-3g and format it as NTFS. It won't be quite as quick on the Mac and there's a possibility of corruption I believe, but it'll be more compatible.

If everyone could get their act together, we'd all be using ZFS probably, but that's not likely to be universally compatible for a while.

jW

 

[Jeffrosproto]

I would go with FAT or NTFS for the pen drive, just in case you have to use the drive on a windows machine.

 

[robotica]

fat on the pen drive
ntfs on the 500gb
hfs on 1TB

 

[volcom883]

It won't be quite as quick on the Mac and there's a possibility of corruption I believe, but it'll be more compatible.

corruption of what/why/how?

I would go with FAT or NTFS for the pen drive

is FAT and FAT32 the same or similar thing? can larger than 4gb files be written to FAT?

 

[xgman]

fat on the pen drive
ntfs on the 500gb
hfs on 1TB

ditto

 

[volcom883]

ok, gotta convert my 1TB HD from fat32 to HSF+ using "disk utility" but i dont know how to do it.
there seem to be 2 options which one do i select:
-931.5 GB TOSHIBA USB 3.5"-HDD Media
under it:
-USB-HDD

then what to i select to format it into HFS+ ?

there seem to be several options such as;
mac os extended, journaled, case-sensitive and journaled/case-sensitive which one do i select?

help would be appreciated

 

[rockstarjoe]

You probably already know this but just a quick warning that formatting your drive deletes everything on it, so make sure you have backed up anything important.

 

[volcom883]

yes sure i know.
by the way i found the way to do it:
press PARTITION
select volume scheme PARTITION 1
press OPTIONS and select the middle option APPLE PARTITION MAP
hit APPLY

thats it!