1 Tb External HDs - why not NTFS?

PeterWright wrote on 4/1/2009, 6:12 PM

Minor irritation time ...

I've now got three of these, and all came formatted FAT32, and therefore needed reformatting, taking several hours.

Why do they come this way - to keep the Macheads happy? - a bit like supplying a PC mouse with only one button, with a kit to add the second yourself ....

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apit34356 wrote on 4/2/2009, 5:32 AM

if you consider the entire market, including all the 5 yr systems in the world, you find that fat 16/32 is without a doubt the majority system and secondary drives. Since most computer users are less than "experts", simple solutions are "best". NTFS is a lot better for large files, allocating space......etc...... but works best Vista,XP, server 2003 and etc.. I think the disk manufacturers are looking for volume sales to simple users using old systems, where disks will be used in very limited fashion, -------- lower failure rates\returns.

newhope wrote on 4/2/2009, 5:34 AM

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

Blink... yes if it is already partitioned and recognized by the system.
Try doing that with a fresh disk when installing Windows, of any type, on it.

You'll be waiting hours on a 1TB drive before the drive is formatted... but the point of the thread is why manufacturers are supplying external drives preformatted in FAT32.

My point is that Mac users don't use FAT32 as their 'native' DOS so have to reformat the drives to Mac OS (HFS) in the same manner as Windows users wanting NTFS have to reformat the drives to NTFS.

Like others have said it is the universality of FAT32 for most operating systems that is the key as to why they are supplied that way. It's readable and writable to all operating systems even though they may operate better and allow larger file sizes in their native (more advanced) DOS like NTFS and Mac OS (HFS+).

Laurence wrote on 4/2/2009, 6:15 AM

A number of years ago, I remember paying about $500 for a one gigabyte drive at Best Buy. This was back when a Pentium 2 was considered a fast machine and it was the first hard drive I'd ever seen that wasn't measured in megabytes.

One of the guys at work gave me the standard "Who could possibly need a whole gigabyte?!! You could type every day all day for the rest of your life and never even come close to filling that thing up..."

I had a four track audio program (SAW I believe) and wanted to add a few more tracks to a three minute song. I set it up to bounce tracks, and let it go for a few hours (yeah even something that simple took that long) and came back to see an error message. All those temporary tracks that were being rendered to bounce the tracks had filled up my new drive and I was already out of space... ah the good old days.

blink3times wrote on 4/2/2009, 6:34 AM

"You'll be waiting hours on a 1TB drive before the drive is formatted... but the point of the thread is why manufacturers are supplying external drives preformatted in FAT32."

Well.... I've never tried that strictly through Windows so I can't comment on it, but it takes me about 5 minutes to format a completely blank 1TB non partitioned drive as FAT32 with BOOTitNG, then another few minutes to quick format it as ntfs with windows.

I think the last time I spent "hours" formatting a drive was back in the dos or win 98 days.

PeterWright wrote on 4/2/2009, 6:54 AM

> the last time I spent "hours" formatting a drive was back in the dos or win 98 days."

- you were lucky!

We 'ad to format floppies wi' our fingernails.... took bloody days.

dxdy wrote on 4/2/2009, 8:12 AM

Back in _my_ early days, you didn't have to format your media. You just took the box of 5081's, put a handfull in the keypunch, and started punching away.

Terje wrote on 4/3/2009, 1:22 AM

>> therefore needed reformatting, taking several hours.

As others have pointed out. if you use quick format it is quicker. That of course assumes you have no data on your FAT32 disk. If you have already put data on it, and the command line doesn't scare you, open a command prompt and do

convert X: /fs:NTFS (where X is the name of your drive)

Convert takes a few seconds to run and it converts your FAT32 drive to an NTFS drive with no data loss.

amendegw wrote on 4/3/2009, 3:15 AM

"Back in _my_ early days, you didn't have to format your media. You just took the box of 5081's, put a handfull in the keypunch, and started punching away"

Ahhh, this takes me back - so far back I can't remember the actual terms to use. You could do something somewhat akin to formatting - i.e. "programming" a master card that you would fit in a drum in the keypunch that would cause the keypunch to automagically punch the common items for each card.

In as similar vein, I recall my TRS-80 only had cassette tape I/O - really unreliable!! It didn't take long for me to realize I needed floppy drives - to the tune of $750/pair - 2 were needed to make backups. You did have to format the floppies, but they only held 120K.

...Jerry