does an external drive need to be formatted?

[minofifa]

hi
i bought a lacie external hard drive to transfer some digital audio onto from our recording session. I'm just wondering if it will work right out of the box (as the salesman told me) or if i need to format it in FAT32 or NTFS or something. i don't want to show up tomorrow and find out that it needed formating, and have to pay extra for the guy to do that first. if it needs formatted, what would be the best file system to use? I'm not sure if the guy iusing a mac or not, so i can't be sure that NTFS would work. the files are gonna be large so FAT32 might not be a good idea either, what is the max size for files in FAT32 again? thanks.

 

[Tarrant64]

Not sure if it needs to be formatted or not. You may have to format it though because not all systems recognize NTFS(Mac, for example). If the other guy is using a Mac, FAT32 is the format to use. It's readable in Windows and Mac. FAT32 should be fine I would think.