Hard Drive Formatting?

[Invader Bugs]

Hey everyone. Here's the deal. I have a 500gb WD Passport Essential. I had formatted it to NTFS right when I got it. It works fine with my Vista laptop. But I now wish I could use it with more. I'd like to be able to connect it to my PS3 and 360 to get media off of it, and I use Windows and Mac both very much on a daily basis, so I think I'd like to format it as FAT32, but before I do, I'd like to ask if this is a good idea. I've heard things that FAT32 doesn't accept files more than 4 gigs? Thanks a lot.

[guns1inger]

Swissknife will let you format the entire disk as FAT32, but you will still have the 4GB single filesize limit.

[redwudz]

Correct, there is a 4GB file size limitation with FAT32. Also a partition/disc size limitation with some OS's, but you can get around that. I've used the freeware SwissKnife on external 500GB HDDs in FAT32 format for a Philips DVD player. Maybe worth looking into. http://www.compuapps.com/Download/swissknife/swissknife.htm

SwissKnife is much faster than Windows for formatting. MS came out with a new exFAT version with Vista that removes some limitations. But it only works with some versions of Vista, so is mostly useless for other platforms and purposes.

[Invader Bugs]

Are there any problems you've had with FAT32? Or just anything else you could point out? I've seen a few websites saying some things about it vs NTFS, but I couldn't really understand what they were saying. I'm just trying to get all my facts before going through the trouble of formatting.

[redwudz]

No major problems outside of the filesize limitation. But if you use formats like Xvid/Divx, or H.264 if a computer is your final destination, seems to work fine as you are unlikely to see that large of a file. Formatting with SwissKnife only takes a few minutes. You can always dump the data to another drive and change the drive format back. If you do cross platform work with a OS that needs FAT32, SwissKnife works great.

[Invader Bugs]

I have some HD files, but I can leave those on the laptop's hard drive or just compress it a little bit. Thanks a lot for the help!

[Invader Bugs]

Ok, I gotta ask. Wtf happened. I downloaded Swissknife, went to go format, when I went to start the format, it gave me an error. I restarted my computer, and when it was back on, the computer can no longer see the drive at all. And now Swissknife just won't open anymore.

[guns1inger]

Swissknife doesn't run under Vista, but if you disconnect and reconnect the drive it should come back