External HD compatible with PC and G4

Tinpusher

Tinpusher

Registered
I'm thinking about getting an external HD that I can use on both my PC, running XP, and on my G4 running OSX 10.2.8.

Two questions really:

(1) anyone got any recommendations? (I was thinking about a LaCie 160GB Extreme II triple).

(2) how can I check which firewire (400 or 800) my G4 supports?

Speed of access the the data is most important to me. I will be using it to work with or backup large files (PhotoShop images, sometimes up to 200MB each).

My most recent effort takes a good minute to load up... and that's from the Seagate internal 80GB HD!

(just out of interest, this the kind of thing I'm doing: http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a327/nrg710/YorkshireDales.jpg)
 
1) I would suggest building your own from a Western Digital 250GB jumbo cache drive (WD2500JB ~$100) and a Bytecc USB2/FireWire case (~$40). Easy to assemble, and the dual interface (USB/FireWire) will guarantee compatibility with most computers.

2) Yours has FireWire 400 (http://lowendmac.com/ppc/dualg4.html or http://lowendmac.com/ppc/gigag4.html).

It'll be plenty speedy (not RAID speed, but fast nonetheless) and that Bytecc case has great cooling via the internal fan to ensure the drive stays nice and cool during extended use.
 
the only problem is with a drive much over 32 gig, windows will have to format it in ntfs, which will only mount on tiger, and then read only. to get a disk that will be read/write on both it has to be formated fat32, and that makes for alot of small 32gig partitions on a 200+gig drive. other option is to format it hfs+ and then buy software for windows that will mount and write to the mac drive, but that will slow things even more down on the win side of things.
 
Hmmm... building my own HD sounds a bit scary. What about if I get a 100GB drive and format it FAT32 with 3 x 32GB partitions? How will that work?
 
Tinpusher said:
Hmmm... building my own HD sounds a bit scary. What about if I get a 100GB drive and format it FAT32 with 3 x 32GB partitions? How will that work?
Click to expand...

But why should they all be FAT32? Why not one hfs, one ntfs and one FAT32
if you need a common filesystem? Like I have told on some other thread,
I have Lacie partitioned in three partitions, one containing hfs+ for Mac,
one containing XFS for Linux and one ntfs for Windows. It was little hard
to partition the disk (I actually partitioned it in Linux and marked the
Mac partition using Linux' fdisk) but I found all the information I needed at
Macosxhints.
 
Can you transfer files between the ntfs and hfs+ partitions on either computer?

My reasons for getting the external HD is to transfer and work with data on both computers.

Let me get this straight- FAT32 can be used on XP and OSX, but ntfs won't work on OSX and hfs+ won't work on XP. Is that right?
 
Tinpusher said:
Let me get this straight- FAT32 can be used on XP and OSX, but ntfs won't work on OSX and hfs+ won't work on XP. Is that right?
Click to expand...
Correct for the most part.

FAT32 is readable and writable on both Windows XP and Mac OS X.

NTFS is readable and writable on Windows XP, but is only readable on Mac OS X -- meaning you cannot copy anything to an NTFS partition on Mac OS X... you can only read what is already there.

HFS+ is readable and writable on Mac OS X, and is neither readable nor writable on Windows XP. You can install software like "MacDrive" (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/) on the Windows XP machine that will allow you to read and write to an HFS+ formatted drive.
 
to answer your second question, yes, you could format a 100 gig in 3 fat32 drives and then use them for both computers.
btw - are they near each other? if they are, you could just network then like i do with mine. and when i want to transfer files, i use mircosoft's remote desktop connection and then copy from one drive to the other. i also formated my ipod in windows so that i can use that too.
 
Also, just a little more information on the FAT32 format: Windows XP has no trouble with FAT32 drives that are formatted larger than 32GB. The only limitation is that it cannot format a drive/partition to be larger than 32GB.

Theoretically, if you could format a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB on some other operating system, Windows XP would have no problems reading from it and writing to it at all. It's just that it can't format it that large itself -- which is kind of a catch-22!
 
i was going to say, have you ever done it, i never have been able to, but some who my dad did get an 80 gig formated in fat32 on his win xp computer, but we don't know how, or have been able to get it to do it again. but then he'll run into the problem someone else had a while ago with a fat32 drive bigger then 32 gig, his mac would not mount it in any way shape or form.
 
Tinpusher said:
Can you transfer files between the ntfs and hfs+ partitions on either computer?

My reasons for getting the external HD is to transfer and work with data on both computers.

Let me get this straight- FAT32 can be used on XP and OSX, but ntfs won't work on OSX and hfs+ won't work on XP. Is that right?
Click to expand...

First question: I cannot not and will not. I use the external disk for backup
only.

Second: Ntfs can be read by OSX, but it cannot write to it. All systems
can read FAT32, so if you like to move data between systems, use it (I
use ethernet)
 
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