Straycat Posted June 25, 2003 Report Share Posted June 25, 2003 Belive it or not but I actually work with this shit (computers that is)...unfortunately I know close to nothing about hardware... This is the situation: I bought an external HDD the other week and it wasn't nearly as easy to get it to work as I initially thought...somehow though I eventually managed (after going back to the shop where I bought the drive and got the correct firewire cable). The external disk had to be formatted and the only choice I had in the list was "NTFS". Now the internal drive is formatted as FAT32 and it sort of "felt like" it would be a good idea to have the external drive the same. Is there anything I should be aware of having the "main drive" FAT32 and the external as NTFS? Inconstencies/performance issues? Should I reformat the external drive to FAT32 and, if so, any recommended tools? I run on XP professional: External drive is an IBM 120 GB, 7200 rpm. Internal: IBM 20 GB. Any input, greatly appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soongmak Posted June 25, 2003 Report Share Posted June 25, 2003 You might want to wait for some expert opinions, but AFAIK there are no issues with having different drives/partitions with different file systems. You use windows pro and that is designed to handle NTFS. For formatting and partitioning I have very good experience with partition magic. AFAIK It even allows you to change the file system as well as the partitions when you have data on the drive. It gives a standard warning to back up your data first, but I haven't had any problems sofar (mind you I haven't tried to chabne the file system _ I use fat32 as well). The program is so easy there is no learning curve involved. Cheers, soongmak Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 26, 2003 Report Share Posted June 26, 2003 A big advantage of an external drive is you can bring it to other machines and plug it in. If the other machine is a Mac, Unix, Windows 9x, or something like that, chances are you won't be able to access the data. You might be able to install an NTFS filesystem in these cases, but why bother? FAT32 is better if interchange is important. With NTFS, you can turn on file encryption. This might be a plus if the data is sensitive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Straycat Posted June 26, 2003 Author Report Share Posted June 26, 2003 Thanks guys! I also read up a bit on Anandtech. As far as I can see there are no issues to be worried about (at least they're not mentioned on that site). The external drive is also working fine so I prolly should assume everything is alright Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ALHOLK Posted June 26, 2003 Report Share Posted June 26, 2003 Hi! Partion Magic is definitely a great progaram. We use it at work for dual boot machines with non M$ opereatin systems. In this case it might be over kill as he is dealing with M$ sytem only and there is no apparent need for editing the partition table. regards ALHOLK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adikgede Posted June 26, 2003 Report Share Posted June 26, 2003 120GB is close to the limit for a FAT32 partition, not to mention the fact that you don't want to ever to do check or repair on 120GB a partition that doesn't have journaling. Stick with NTFS its far superior to FAT32, and if you need to share it with a computer that can't mount NTFS file systems just share it across a network Mac OS X Linux/Unix all have facilities for reading SMB shares. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 26, 2003 Report Share Posted June 26, 2003 120GB is close to the limit for a FAT32 partition FAT32 has a 2 terabyte limit for what it's worth. It should have technically been called FAT28 because the high nibble in each 32 bit fat entry is reserved for future use. not to mention the fact that you don't want to ever to do check or repair on 120GB a partition that doesn't have journaling Good point! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BelgianBoy Posted June 27, 2003 Report Share Posted June 27, 2003 Says Straycat: I run on XP professional: External drive is an IBM 120 GB, 7200 rpm. Internal: IBM 20 GB. Straycat, Can you tell me what you paid for that ? Cheers ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Straycat Posted June 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted June 27, 2003 Most certainly. The drive itself was 5500 baht (or something like that -- I don't remember exactly). The hard drive case / firewire connect box was 1800 baht. A firewire cable that actually worked, 400 baht. Then some extra baht to let "Somchai" put it together for me. Total 8600 baht. I thought it was a fairly good deal but I didn't actually hunt for best price. I just really needed the extra storage. I bought at Fortune Town, 3rd or 4th floor (Ratchadapisek Rd, Din Deaeng intersection). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Straycat Posted June 27, 2003 Author Report Share Posted June 27, 2003 They also had IBM 180 GB drives...but it seemed a bit overpriced so I went with the 120 GB. I must say it works nicely. The reason I went for an external drive is that I work mostly from my lap top & I suspect it would be much more expensive to change its internal hard drive than to just add an external... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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