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Hi Forum,
I am a switcher (and happy) and still encounter loads of windows machines in my day to day work (in the IT field)
I recently purchased a 500GB External hard drive. I plugged the drive in and was excited to see that the HDD was formatted in FAT32. So I was happy because of FAT32 being an open format which would be read/write compatible with no matter what OS I encountered and had to work on.
My question firstly, I thought that FAT32 wasn't implementable on any drive over 40GB ???
Secondly, is there any problem with running FAT32? Isn't is a very old and antiquated format?
Thirdly and lastly, is there any speed decrease with having a 500GB drive in FAT32 format? (shouldn't I rather split the drive 50/50 and have one for Windows Things in NTFS (which I can READ under Mac) and 250GB in a Mac HDD Format?
I am busy transferring data a large amount of data to the drive on a Windows machine and the transfer rate is bobbing between 11megabytes/serc and 13megabytes/sec
Now, given that this is a 2.5" hard drive (USB powered) I can understand that there MIGHT be some type of performance decrease when compared to a 3.5" external powered drive. But to put it into perspective, I am used to seeing speeds of 25 to 35 megabytes/sec on the 3.5" drives (running NTFS)
Now, my OFFICIAL last question ( ) - is this speed decrease because it is running FAT32 on such a large partition or because this is just normal with the smaller 2.5" external USB powered drives?
Your expert opinions and answers appreciated and thanks in advance,
Chris Grant
I am a switcher (and happy) and still encounter loads of windows machines in my day to day work (in the IT field)
I recently purchased a 500GB External hard drive. I plugged the drive in and was excited to see that the HDD was formatted in FAT32. So I was happy because of FAT32 being an open format which would be read/write compatible with no matter what OS I encountered and had to work on.
My question firstly, I thought that FAT32 wasn't implementable on any drive over 40GB ???
Secondly, is there any problem with running FAT32? Isn't is a very old and antiquated format?
Thirdly and lastly, is there any speed decrease with having a 500GB drive in FAT32 format? (shouldn't I rather split the drive 50/50 and have one for Windows Things in NTFS (which I can READ under Mac) and 250GB in a Mac HDD Format?
I am busy transferring data a large amount of data to the drive on a Windows machine and the transfer rate is bobbing between 11megabytes/serc and 13megabytes/sec
Now, given that this is a 2.5" hard drive (USB powered) I can understand that there MIGHT be some type of performance decrease when compared to a 3.5" external powered drive. But to put it into perspective, I am used to seeing speeds of 25 to 35 megabytes/sec on the 3.5" drives (running NTFS)
Now, my OFFICIAL last question ( ) - is this speed decrease because it is running FAT32 on such a large partition or because this is just normal with the smaller 2.5" external USB powered drives?
Your expert opinions and answers appreciated and thanks in advance,
Chris Grant