Fat 32 formatting: Does it Make a Difference?

Hi,
I searched around, but I couldn't find anything that answered my question specifically.
Im searching for a cheap external hard drive and Im looking at the Western Digital My Book Premium 320GB 7200 RPM. Ive found reviews that it is configured in FAT32 which has a max filesize of 4 GB. Is this applicible to us mac users? I want to back up my computer with time machine which I know is a file larger than 4GB. If It makes a difference, Is there anyway to reformat this drive into NTFS?

thanks,

Ian

If you are going to use it with your Mac, simply reformat it using Disk Utility to Mac OS Extended Journaled. This will remove all the restrictions you are worried about.

You can format it but not to NTFS, macs can not write to NTFS, so its best to format it to Mac OS Extended Journaled like suggested above. But yes, the drive can easily be formatted, its just the way the drive comes from the company that is fat 32, but drive formats are never set in stone.

If you want to use the disk with Time Machine, you have no choice. HFS+ (Journaled) is the file format the disk WILL be. It really does make the choice easy.

thanks, thats really helpful.