Just got a new hard drive.

infokill

infokill

Well-known member
Ok i just got a 120gig external hard drive from lacie.
after formating and everything to get it to work i came up with 2 questions for anyone that can help me out.
1-i noticed after i installed it and checked the space on it, it says it only has 111gig's free. why isnt the full 120 there?
2-do i have to format the drive everytime i move to another computer? or im i set? also im running this on a pc right now, but im getting a mac soon. will i not be able to move my hard drive without losing everything on it?

-Thanks
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

Hi Info,

1- Every drive loses a percentage of its space after formatting (like 8% or so) it's normal.

2- I have had no trouble moving from PC to PC, but no luck with going from PC to Mac. Maybe newer macs can identify PC firewire drives more easily.
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

I don't think a Mac can recognize the NTFS file system the drive is probably formatted in.
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

macs use a certain HFS formatting, different than pc's...
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

Your Mac will recognize the drive ONLY IF IT'S IN FAT OR FAT 32 FORMAT.

NTFS WON'T WORK, the Mac will prompt you that the disk is unreadble and ask you if you wanna format it. In two clicks, you could lose everything.

But even in FAT or FAT 32, this feature is just for occasional use — to be able to transfer datas onto a HFS+ Mac drive — not for daily use. The Mac is able to read, not to exploit full power of these formats. As a matter of fact, the access is soooooo slooooooow that you won't even have any temptation to use it.

Unless of course you use a Windows emulator on your Mac, but even here, you will only slow down your machine, I don't see the interest, unless you wanna run PC apps on your Mac.

If you get a Mac soon, try to keep your disk as empty as possible, make a back-up of your datas and reformat it in the Mac HFS+ format before retransferring your back-upped datas onto it. If you have jpg's, pct's, mov's, wmp's, txt's, rtf's, doc's, xls's or any likable standardised files, the Mac will open them without any problem, assuming the fact you've got applications able to open them.
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

There is a program available that will allow you to set up an HFS partition from a pC and I believe that you can even read and write to it from a pc. I can't remember the name of it but a google search would find it. Basically you just need to partition your drive, run the program and set one of your partitions to the HFS format. You can then do all your work on the NTFS partition, and when you want to bring something over to the mac just copy it to your HFS partition.
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

http://www.macwindows.com/disks2.html

the space available on the disk isnt really accurately checked by the O.S. due to stuff i dont want to get into here. if you want an accurate check. do a disk check in DOS or whatever the mac line command thingy is if your on a mac. that should give you an accurate reading of the storage space on the drive.
 
Re: Just got a new hard drive.

Loosing HD size, this is old marketing trick.
When manufacture sell they advertise hard drive size in
1 Mgb = 1000 bit, or 1 Gbt = 1000 Mbt, but
computer based on original 8 bit = 1 byte, so
all computers still see 1 Mbt = 1024 , or 1 Gbt = 1024 Mbt.
Technicly if on hard drive box saying 80Gbt HD it would be around 74Gbt formated.
Some one was even tried to sue them for falls advertising, but not successfully.
Also you will loose space when you formatiing disk, for partition information and other overhead.

If you format HD as NTFS, and don't enable compression or encryption, you can read this Hard drive from any other PC running W2K, NT, or XP.
Mac support FAT or FAT32
Linux can support any format, but it based on your installation.
 
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