Fat32/NTFS External Hard Drive Formatting Questions.

[bbanderic]

Hi All,

I have two 1tb extenal hard drives (Verbatim quad interface), they came pre-formatted in Fat32. I've done a bit of resesarch and found out that Fat32 format can only handle files up to 4gb. That's ok for audio and DVD files (video.ts, file mode) but I plan on archiving all of my concert Blu-ray discs and many of the files are up to 18gb in size. It seems as though my only option would be to format the drives to NTFS to handle the Blu-ray files.

Formatting the drives to NTFS is a potential problem as well because down the road I'd like to stream the Blu-ray, audio and DVD files to my TV possibly through my PS3 but the PS3 doesn't recognize NTFS formatted hard drives. I'm curious if there's a workaround for streaming through the PS3, or if I need to do it through another device, such as the WD TV Live HD media player, that would recognize an NTSF formatted hard drive. Or, if there's another way of keeping the drives FAT32 and somehow getting the Blu-ray files on there without changing the integrity of them.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[lowellriggsiam]

I am just throwing this out here, but could you partition the drives leaving 1/2 FAT32 and 1/2NTFS?

[edDV]

I make a small FAT32 partition as a transfer drive for Mac, Linux, DVD players and Media players. The rest of the drive is formatted as an NTFS partition. The Mac OSX and Linux machines can read the NTFS drives but require special drivers to write.

Normally, I transfer files over wired or wireless networks so individual files are readable to all computers and UPnP/MCE media extenders regardless of formatting standard.