External hard drives, windows/mac.

H

HateEternal

Mac Metal Head
I am looking into buying some external storage, what i was leaning towards was getting a external firewire enclosure and then buying a hard drive to put in it.

I know windows and Mac os use different file systems so unless some one tells me differently i am assuming that i wont be able to use it on both computers, unless i make 2 partitions.

I also would like some suggestions on enclosures if people have them. Something that is mac and windows would be sweet,

This is the one i am looking at right now http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=17-145-745&depa=0

So far i am not sure that it is Mac compatible, the one on speeze's site says it is osx compatible but it is different than that one.

Thanks.
 
+ If you format the drive in Windows format, it will be accessible from your Mac as well. You probably won't need to make separate partitions, except in some very specific circumstances.

+ I'd recommed looking for an enclosure that has both USB2 and Firewire connections, as these are the most versatile.
 
More specifically, you want to format it in the FAT32 filesystem. Windows is now standardizing on NTFS, which MacOSX would have trouble reading/writing.

True (horror) story that maybe you can learn from:

I have a SmartDisk 40 GB external fw HD that I formatted into FAT32, I was able to use it on both my Mac and PC. Everything is all fine and dandy. Well the only annoying thing is that OSX still stores meta data into hidden files, the filename is the same as the original but prefixed with a "." period. They're hidden in OSX, but when I look in the drive when connected to my PC, there's a bunch of those little files and .DS_STORE or something like that.

I hear Panther doesn't write those meta files onto non-native filesystems anymore, I was using 10.1.

Now for the scary part. So one day I decided to just reformat the drive into HFS+ as a way to force myself to use my Mac full-time and rely on my PC less. I *MOVE* all the files off my firewire HD and onto my Mac HD. Big mistake. A file transfer error occurred in the middle of the transfer, I didn't quite understand the question in the error message box, so I just hit cancel to get out. BIG MISTAKE.

Because I didn't do a COPY then erase the drive as is, OSX took it upon itself to DELETE all my files off my firewire hard drive anyways, even though the files DID NOT safely make it to their destination. Over 20 GB of data collected in my 7+ years of computing all gone that quick. Some of it was backed up, a lot of it was irreplacible.

You're probably thinking "He should have backed up first" (well this was my backup sorta) or you might I should have done something differently. Let me explain why this made me mad. In Windows, when you permanently move a file(s), it makes a copy of the file into the destination then it deletes the original. If the same transfer error occured (which has happened before - for example a "disk is full" error etc.) Windows would not delete the original files.

It seems so simple and makes more sense to just copy the files then get rid of duplicates myself. But that's a 2 step process, whereas in Windows I can get the same effect (plus safety) in just 1 step.

I say again, I was using OSX 10.1, things must have improved since and data transfer to a FAT32 partition is probably more reliable now than it was. I just wanted to emphasize a point that the transfer error had to do with OSX's not-so-good code in dealing with FAT32 filesystem. After formatting my firewire drive into HFS+ I could do massive data transfer without any problems.
 
ok thanks guys, I actually may just but a large disk for my PC and take out the 80 i have in there and dedicate that towards the mac firewire disk

Anyone recommend any enclosures?
 
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