Hard Drive Formatting Question

Jim Brennan

Jim Brennan

VHS Member Old Skool
I picked up a few 320 Gig Maxtor Firewire Externals at Microcenter today. (90 bucks a piece) AFter formatiing them I tried to move some files. The larger ones (multi-gig) won't transfer and I get an error message. I seem to recall this happening to me once before (It's been awhile since i had to add hard drives), and there was some easy formatting fix. Something about a default limit on file size transfers.

Anyone?
 
How did you format it? If it is formatted in NTFS (Windows) or ext3 (Linux), you won't have the 4gb file size limitation that comes with Fat32.
 
I just erased it (they are formatted for windows and I have a G5), then partitioned it per the install instructions. 4 gigs sounds about right for the cutoff.
 
I guess I had left the default "MS-DOS" choice on. WHich is kinda dumb since it's a Mac....but anyway I repartitioned it choosing "Mac OS Extended", but not the journaled. It was just a shot in the dark, but it seems to allow the file transfers now.

Was that a good choice? What does all that mean anyway?
 
Well, every so often something would happen and I ran through an fsck session that lasted around 10 min or so and that drove me freaking insane. That and the fact that my p3 is the bottleneck... and I don't really care about speed, since the box is more of a firewall / file server sort of thing anyway... :)
 
Mostly I use them to store old projects. I do go in there now and again to use the footage for something else, or to create different versions for clients.

By 'security', do you mean from other people, or that the data is more secure?

Thanks for the link.

Tommy...I have no idea what language you are talking.
 
Jim Brennan said:
By 'security', do you mean from other people, or that the data is more secure?
Click to expand...

Sorry, poor choice of words on my part. I meant that the data itself is more secure from failure. For example, in the event that a write operation to the hard drive is interrupted part-way (ie a power failure, etc), the incident is less likely to cause data loss on a journaled file system than on a non-journaled one.


Jim Brennan said:
Tommy...I have no idea what language you are talking.
Click to expand...

ReiserFS and ext3 are two competing file systems for GNU/Linux. "fsck" is a file system check utility similar to chkdisk or scandisk for Windows.
 
Jim Brennan said:
Tommy...I have no idea what language you are talking.
Click to expand...

LOL. Sorry Jim... it's a Linux filesystem.

TwistedLincoln said:
Sorry, poor choice of words on my part. I meant that the data itself is more secure from failure. For example, in the event that a write operation to the hard drive is interrupted part-way (ie a power failure, etc), the incident is less likely to cause data loss on a journaled file system than on a non-journaled one.

ReiserFS and ext3 are two competing file systems for GNU/Linux. "fsck" is a file system check utility similar to chkdisk or scandisk for Windows.
Click to expand...

Well, that's what would drive me nuts... If the file system wasn't cleanly mounted, fsck would start up by the startup scripts and I would have to wait forever for fsck to stop checking the filesystem. Now, if I have a power failure, all I have to do is wait 5 seconds for the journal to replay and verify that there's no data integrity issues before my startup script resumes.

Granted, this was under ext2... etx3 might be much better optimized as far as fsck-scanning...
 
I think so...

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