I'm in the middle of migrating to Mac. I'm about to reformat my external storage, a WD MyBook 2 TB-Raid1. I was planning on reformatting to HFS+ but a friend told me he was told by a Mac vendor to format his external disc to Fat 32 in order to keep compatbility among operating systems like Mac and Windows.
Now, this sounds great, but I know FAT 32 has limitations of 4gb file size and 32gb volume size.
I would not be concerned about this limitations because my picture files are far from this limit. On volume size I don't know. What exactly is a "volume"?
Chances are, I'll start producing small videos for events now that the VSLR is a reality.
I will purchase a 5D2 whenever is available.
Also, I think I'll keep Windows under Bootcamp for those files coming from else like tiff and coreldraw (for instance).
Please comments, thoughts, warnings, anything . Thanks a lot.
Eduardo
It is possible to go above 32GB for FAT32 drives (the limit is actually 2TB), but it isn't straighforward or even recommended. Performance for random access is likely to be suboptimal anway.
A "Volume" is a storage location using a specific file system that is accessible through a single descriptor (for example a drive letter, a volume name, a share name). It may be totally virtual, and an abstraction to integrate storage areas from different sources.
In practice
FAT32: you'll have to hack a bit to create the file system. It can be done, probably a bad idea.
exFAT: easy but Windows world only
HFS+: easy but OSX world only
NTFS: best under Windows, limited native support under OS X. However, this is the one I'd use, through NTSF-3G (
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/.)
NTFS-3G is free, well supported, used in hundreds of Linux versions and even somewhat endorsed by Microsoft
(
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd228988.aspx)
Install MacFuse first
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/Then
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/index.html#downloadReboot your Mac and you are all set, ready to use 931GB (after formatting) of storage
The only thing to remember will be to use "safely remove" when the drive will be disconnected from the Windows machine. (it is normally not mandatory on Windows). You may have some issues with file names if they make full use of the unicode character set, but accented file names are never an excellent idea anyway.
If you are of the anxious type, rest assured that there is absolutely nothing experimental about MacFuse: it is, for example, used internally by Parallels. I've been using it extensively for a few months on the single drive version of the 1TB MyBook.
Pierre