Folks,

I got a new 320 GB hard drive for my MacBook for x-mas, so I saved the old 160gb hard drive, bought an enclosure for it on ebay and it's now a 160GB external drive. I did this the last time I upgraded with an old 80GB. Since I use both Mac and PC, and prefer to 1) be able to share the files between the two if I need to and 2) not have to determine how much space I need for each OS ahead of time, I formatted the 80gb hard drive as FAT32 (vs an OSX partition and NTFS partition).

As of last night, I've done the same thing with the new hard 160gb drive (FAT32), but in reading on the internet, I see things about FAT32 having problems with larger capacity drives and potentially "inefficent" use of space. I didn't have any issues over the last few years with my 80GB hard drive.

Is there any reason (other than a 4GB file size limit) that I should steer clear of FAT32 for backing up my files? Like I said, given that I use two OS's frequently, it's really the easiest format for me to use.

If for some reason I should not be backing up on FAT32, I could alway have the 160GB hard drive be formatted for 110GB OSX and 50GB FAT32 (the FAT32 would just be for temporarily storing files that I want to move from the Mac to PC, for example, my ~40GB of music files), and then I could format the 80GB hard drive for NTFS for backing up gaming stuff from my windows install.

So, like I said, FAT32 is a lot easier. So, given my intended use, any reason to steer away from FAT32?

Yes, FAT32 is much more prone to uncorrectable errors. Very bad choice for backup unless very temporary.



I realize NTFS is not helping you on a Mac.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/ntfs_or_fat32_file_system.htm

Thanks. Looks like I've been lucky with FAT32 so far and I probably want to chang my strategy moving forward.

I'll probably just split the hard drive into HFS and NTFS and write to those partitions from their respective OS's. I know Mac's can read (but not write) NTFS and it looks like there are free drivers to allow winXP to read HFS, so I can still transfer stuff from one OS to the other easily using those two partitions.

Thanks!

Hi Malibu,

Could you not network your PC and MAC and put the external drive on the PC and share it over the network ?

That's what I've got set up on my 2 PC's currently. I don't use MACs so I may be wrong in what I'm suggesting ... maybe somebody could confirm/deny that this is possible.

Cheers,

Andy

Well, in my case the Mac and PC are the same laptop with a partitioned hard drive. I guess I could set aside a small FAT32 partition of the hardrive and use that to go between the two OS's if I needed to. In my case, the point of the external drive is to back stuff up on it and keep it separate from the laptop in case something happens to the laptop. Then occasionally I use the external drive to move things from one computer to another (either one of mine, my wife's, or work).

What I might actually do is split the larger one into HFS and NTFS for storage and backup, and leave the older smaller one as FAT32 to moving things around.

Exfat will work on Mac OS X 10.6.5 and up.