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a bit confused about external enclosures

S

sniperruff

Lifer
ok so my co-worker wants an external hard drive to back up his massive audio files... and it'd be perfect since i want to get rid of my massive WD2000JB sitting in my room new in box doing nothing...

the problem is that he wants to hook it up onto his mac (G4 i think), and he also has a thinkpad.

so here are some questions about external enclosures:

1) does external enclosures work for mac's?
2) if #1 applies, does the WHOLE hard drive has to be formatted by the mac? (can i partition some for PC and some of mac?)
3) i've read somewhere that mac's does not support hard drives larger than 128gig, is this true?
4) if #3 is true, how will the external 200gig work?

thanks i have no experience with external and mac... and a combination of both gives me a headache...
 
I believe Mac can read FAT32 but not NTFS, so partitioning & formatting differeently may work. I did buy software for my daughter at NYU which purportedly will allow the Mac to recognize a PC & vice-versa on an iPod. The software from this company for her iPod works great (According to her.) I have no experience with this for HDDs, just noticed it while looking at the iPod software. They do have a substantial educational discount program.

Link to Software
 
Originally posted by: Twofootputt
I believe Mac can read FAT32 but not NTFS, so partitioning & formatting differeently may work. I did buy software for my daughter at NYU which purportedly will allow the Mac to recognize a PC & vice-versa on an iPod. The software from this company for her iPod works great (According to her.) I have no experience with this for HDDs, just noticed it while looking at the iPod software. They do have a substantial educational discount program.

Link to Software
Click to expand...

thanks and i still want to know if external enclosures work on mac's... =)

 
External... what? SCSI? USB 2.0? FireWire? Those three will work fine on a Mac. I suppose you could pipe the SATA out of a G5 as well.

Mac OS X can handle FAT32 out of the box, and if you fiddle with the command-line-interface a bit, you can get it to work with NTFS as well. Partitions are a good idea, you can make one a UFS or HFS+ partition so it's native to Mac OS. But just using FAT32 will work too.

I'm not aware of any size limits, at least on the Macs I've seen. Many studios and post production centers use external 250+ GB drives via FireWire on their Macs. It's faster to actually move a large (150+ GB) file via "sneakernet" using external FireWire hard drive than it is to use even gigabit ethernet.
 
Originally posted by: halfadder
External... what? SCSI? USB 2.0? FireWire? Those three will work fine on a Mac. I suppose you could pipe the SATA out of a G5 as well.

Mac OS X can handle FAT32 out of the box, and if you fiddle with the command-line-interface a bit, you can get it to work with NTFS as well. Partitions are a good idea, you can make one a UFS or HFS+ partition so it's native to Mac OS. But just using FAT32 will work too.

I'm not aware of any size limits, at least on the Macs I've seen. Many studios and post production centers use external 250+ GB drives via FireWire on their Macs. It's faster to actually move a large (150+ GB) file via "sneakernet" using external FireWire hard drive than it is to use even gigabit ethernet.
Click to expand...

bingo.
 
Originally posted by: halfadder
External... what? SCSI? USB 2.0? FireWire? Those three will work fine on a Mac. I suppose you could pipe the SATA out of a G5 as well.

Mac OS X can handle FAT32 out of the box, and if you fiddle with the command-line-interface a bit, you can get it to work with NTFS as well. Partitions are a good idea, you can make one a UFS or HFS+ partition so it's native to Mac OS. But just using FAT32 will work too.

I'm not aware of any size limits, at least on the Macs I've seen. Many studios and post production centers use external 250+ GB drives via FireWire on their Macs. It's faster to actually move a large (150+ GB) file via "sneakernet" using external FireWire hard drive than it is to use even gigabit ethernet.
Click to expand...

ah thanks. perfect i'll suggest buying my co-worker a usb2/firefire combo then =)
 
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