P2 to external Hard-Drive

[sodotoguwangus]

I remember reading somewhere in the past about how an external hard-drive is limited to around 15 partitions (or something like that), and how if you go too big, your just paying for space you can't use.

I have a 4 gig P2 card. How big of a hard-drive do I need for 4 gig P2 transfers? Also, do any of you have specific recommendations as to what would be a good, cost-effective hard-drive to get?

Remember, I'm going to be dumping to my laptop in the field (which is a PC), and editing on my desktop in the office (which is a mac.) I must make sure that the video files on the hard drive can be read by both computers (PC and MAC).

Any reccomendations for a good HDD to purchase???

 

[TwistedLincoln]

If you have a 4gb card, the max drive size you can use for firewire offload is 60gb. If you have an 8gb card, the max size is 120gb. However, if you're using a USB On-The-Go enclosure, you can use as large of a hard drive as you like.

 

[filmstox]

The 15 partition limit only applies when you are dumping the contents of P2 cards directly from the camera via firewire to an external HDD with the HVX in Host Mode. The HVX creates a new partition for each card when it formats the HDD. If you are not having the HVX manage the transfer (ie streaming to the FireStore, or having a USB OTG drive manage the trasfer via USB, or using a laptop to transfer) then the 15 partition limit does not apply and you can use as large a drive as you like.

For PC/Mac compatability, I've been formatting all of my drives as FAT32 using this utility running on the PC:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

or get Symantec's Partition Magic.

Happy shooting!
-filmstox