Some companies are marketing drives for PC and for Mac, but they are just formatted either FAT32 for mac or NTFS for windows. You can reformat any of them.

Dave T2

You young whippersnappers! Why ... i remember the days, long long ago, when drives came unformatted. We even had to do something called a low-level format. And before we could do that we had jumper switches and bios parameters to set. Then the formatting took the better part of a day. And finally, at last, we'd rejoice in our amazing 0.00002TB of storage space.

Now that i think of it, it really wasn't that long ago.

A few hours to reformat a drive? Seems like a delight to me. Go edit video while it's formatting, or have a nice meal, or play with your kids.

Easy answer:

Any OS will recognize FAT32 on bootup, but those mentioned above plus Win98/95 (yes, there are lots of those boxes out there) don't understand NTFS. So preformatting FAT32 is more "universal."

The inconvenience to (perhaps the majority of) customers is less of a liability to retailers than the returns they would face if they all came NTFS. It's just a retail FOL.

Thanks - yes, as I said, only a minor annoyance, which is more than compensated by the price of HDs these days

When I started video editing, I had to use SCSI drives, and 9Gb cost AU$2000
Now 1Tb costs AU$175

So from $222 per Gb it's come down to $0.175 per Gb : an improvement of 1270 times less!

My first 500 MB drive was just over $100.
Now I can buy a TB for the same price.
That's 1/20th the price per storage space.

I'm not going to tell you what I paid for my first HiFi Stereo VCR.

The future is looking very promising for media storage.

wiki:

"The Secure Digital Extended Capacity (SDXC) format was unveiled at CES 2009. The maximum capacity defined for SDXC cards is 2 TB (2048 GB). SDHC cards also have a maximum capacity of 2 TB based on the card data structures, but this is arbitrarily limited to 32 GB by the SD 2.0 document."

Thats a lot of storage on a tiny card.

"Why do they come this way "

Actually...

NTFS is owned by Microsoft... and THAT'S why they're not formatted as such. They would need Microsoft's permission (and probably have to pay a fee) to format as NTFS

Ha I remember working with the floppy on my old Atari 800. If you didn't connect the drive and boot it up before starting to write a program you couldn't save it. Imagine working on some code for 3 or 4 hours going for a save an noticing the drive was never turned on and booted! It was extra painful because you actually had to turn of the computer and willfully delete your work!

As the good old days...

- Mark

NTFS was developed by Microsoft and the format is a trade secret. M$ will give you a licence and the source code subject to a NDA. That in no way restricts anyway selling a HDD preformatted as NTFS.

Bob.

"The SDXC specification has selected Microsoft's proprietary exFAT file system as the standard for this memory card format;[22][23][24] however, as with SDHC and SD, it is possible to use another filesystem such as FAT32 or ext2."

The problem of course with FAT32 is the 4gig file limit... which people are already experiencing first hand on the various avchd cams out there. Long continuous shoots get chopped up in order to accommodate FAT32. When this happens you must use the supplied software (or some dos/command line based instruction set) to piece the file back together before import to Vegas.... otherwise the incomplete gop structure caused by the file chop ends up as lost frames on the time line.

What concerns me more with external disks is the way they want to install all manner of software on your system.

Bob.

"M$ will give you a licence and the source code subject to a NDA. That in no way restricts anyway selling a HDD preformatted as NTFS."

I'm not altogether sure that "give" is the right word there Bob. Are you sure "sell" might be a better one?

Seventeen years ago I special ordered a 500 MB hard drive. It cost me $1,200.00. Getting half a meg of RAM with a box was pretty much the norm, and add-on RAM was about $100 per meg.

I bought two, 4-gig thumb drives at Wally World for $16 last week.

".... and therefore needed reformatting, taking several hours. "


What operating system ?

With XP, ( pretty sure with Vista also ) you can use ' Disk Management ' (in the System Management utility ), delete the partition, create a new partition and format with NTFS using ' quick format ' option '..

Might take all of a minute.. Maybe two, if you haven't used the tool before...

What concerns me more with external disks is the way they want to install all manner of software on your system.

You are right Bob. At work I installed a WD 2TB external drive, and it installed some driver / config.util. I would have wanted one like that at home, but cannot move between PC's without installing extras on each.

/Ulf

Yeah, thanks Stringer - I thought there may be a quicker way - in XP I just right clicked, selected Format and input NTFS.
I also have utilities such as Perfect Disk which would probably do a quicker job too - didn't think of it at the time .....

"I'm not altogether sure that "give" is the right word there Bob. Are you sure "sell" might be a better one? "

I don't know the answer to your specific question however based on the amount of stuff M$ give away for free I'd bet good money it's free. Keep in mind that Vegas relies on free stuff from M$, SQL Server and .NET. Neither you or SCS pay anything to M$ for either of those.

Bob.

Why do they come this way - to keep the Macheads happy?

Actually, while Macs can read and write to Fat32, they use their own Mac OS DOS not Fat32 and can read NTFS disks as well. So as a Mac user I format them as well... though Macs do that quite a lot faster whether I'm installing and formatting a new internal drive or formatting an external disk.

With NTFS for Mac they can write to them as well. I recently formatted a 250GB partition in NTFS in about 30 seconds on my Mac Pro under Mac OSX.

I run both Mac OSX and Windows XP... have to have at least one NTFS partition, other than the Winodws boot partition, as DVDA won't create DVDs on Mac formatted drives even though I have MacDrive for Windows.

"I don't know the answer to your specific question however based on the amount of stuff M$ give away for free I'd bet good money it's free."

Well, there has to be more to it than that Bob.... otherwise more camera manufacturers would be formatting as NTFS. It must be a real pain in the butt.... and added expense to devise a system to chop up your files to accommodate FAT32. I know through personal experience that it's certainly a pain to the consumer.

"I format them as well... though Macs do that quite a lot faster whether I'm installing and formatting a new internal drive or formatting an external disk."

PC's can do it just as fast. It takes me less than 2 minutes to format my 1TB drive with quick format.

Currently, M$ has licensing and royalty fees for FAT15/32 that all manufacturers pay to use. M$ was in the beginning of NTFS very rigid about licensing to manufacturers and OEMs. I have not heard of M$ waving royalties for NTFS to DISK manufacturers, but maybe like penny>? ;-) Seriously, even flash manufacturers or resellers paid for M$ for FAT.

"Seriously, even flash manufacturers or resellers paid for M$ for FAT."

But that doesn't really answer the question here apit. If they have to pay a penny for FAT rights then why not pay a penny for NTFS...Running NTFS would be a lot easier for all involved.

The only answer I can think of is that the rules regarding NTFS are not only stiffer but the rights MUCH more expensive. Enough anyway so that it becomes more cost effective to devise a system to accommodate fat32 file size issues