Optimal external HDD format

[mentalcrisis00]

Hey all

I just bought an external hard drive for video and image editing. My school has all MAC's currently and I do a lot of my work there. However I have 2 PC's and I also do much of my work on them not to mention my desktop is used for backup. I have been looking for ways to format my external drive to be MAC and PC friendly. It seems the quickest solution is FAT32 because it works on both PC and MAC with no other software needed. However I've read that it is unstable, tends to corrupt data, and you can only transfer files 4GB and under in size? This is not acceptable seeming this data is very important and most of my files are 30GB and up.

I found a site that says you can format with a MAC and get a program called "MacDrive" for the PC which will allow one to read and write with a MAC formated drive. Has anyone had success with this program? Is it stable? This is just about the only other alternative for me because I can't install any programs on my schools MAC's.

Any other suggestions or thoughts on FAT32?

-Ray

 

[taltamir]

FAT32 isn't THAT bad... While it lacks in maximum sizes, it doesn't corrupt your data. Drive errors corrupt your data (and those happen naturally... I saw quality SAS drives that proudly claimed ONLY 1bit out of a 10 billion (10TB) would be written erronously, that is supposed to be a GOOD figure...) at least when data on FAT32 breaks you can do a chkdisk and it makes the file accessible again (although with a wrong bit somewhere in the file, big deal with software and lossless compression, not a big deal with lossy compressed video or photo). With NTFS I rutinely run into abberations, like directories or files that cannot be deleted or modified, that cannot be fixed by chkdisk, and that are not due to bad sectors (mirrored to another drive and problem persists).. a format is the only way to get rid of those.
I still use NTFS over FAT simply because of the filesize, file amount, and name length issues.

Most programs will split files into multiple GB files if needed. So it shouldn't be a huge issue.

The ideal way to share data between a mac and a PC would probably be through a netowork, but if you don't have both a PC and a MAC at home then you need some sort of file system accessibility.

I know there is a way for MACs to access NTFS (using FUSE) but I don't know if it is on by default. You could just do a test.

 

[mentalcrisis00]

ya the MACs at my school can read data on an NTFS drive but can't write to it, and I really need to do both. I doubt I will have a problem once I'm out of school because I don't think I'll be getting a MAC. It would mean buying a bunch of MAC programs and I just bought up Adobe premier elements and photoshop CS3 for the PC. However I have been working on a film in iMovie and Final Cut and don't have a way to get it on my PC other then using FAT32.

Would I be able to link my laptop to the mac I'm working on with firewire? I saw someone at the school doing this with one of there Macbooks and that was new to me.

 

[Nothinman]

Would I be able to link my laptop to the mac I'm working on with firewire? I saw someone at the school doing this with one of there Macbooks and that was new to me.

It worked at some point but I think MS dropped support for IP over Firewire semi-recently.

 

[solog]

Originally posted by: taltamir
I still use NTFS over FAT simply because of the filesize, file amount, and name length issues.

I thought that NTFS could use longer file names but over here:

NTFS vs. FAT

it says FAT32 and NTFS both have a 255 character max

???

 

[Nothinman]

Win32 has a max path value of 255 so if you're using Windows you're screwed but IIRC but NTFS supports longer.