to FAT 32 or not ?

martian · Post by **martian** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 12:50 am

just got an extra hard drive ( FW 400 ) it's like 300 gig

it's format as FAT32 - which is handy if I wanna work with windows - which I do

will the SDII be ok on there - or is that just email that scews things up?

Splinter · Post by **Splinter** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 6:23 am

Can't verify this, but I've been told that working on a FAT32 formatted drive can slow access time and reduce throughput. Not good for recording audio. If you can find a formatting app that will allow you to format FAT32 for the Mac, partition the drive and use part for your Mac and the other for your PC.

croyal · Post by **croyal** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 6:40 am

Splinter · Post by **Splinter** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:00 am

croyal wrote:Not!

Chris:

So are you saying FAT32 will not slow down disk performance? So you're saying OSX can read and write to FAT32 as simply as it does HFS+? I'd really like to know. That said, I think partitioning a drive for PC and Mac is better for file management anyway unless you are working cross-platform (i.e. Pro Tools.)

kraigmason · Post by **kraigmason** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:10 am

My suggestion is DO NOT format in FAT 32.
It was one of the components that led to a near catastrophe with my data.
HFS+ is the way to go with OSX.

emulatorloo · Post by **emulatorloo** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:16 am

There was a thread here in the last 6 months about somebody w screwed up DP and Audio Files that had been stored on a Windows Drive.

Why in the world would you want to screw around w FAT 32 on a Mac?

I think you are asking for trouble.

I work w windows too, but drives are cheap enough that I have a firewire drive dedicated to my win machine and when I want to transfer big audio files back and forth I just hook it up to my mac.

martian · Post by **martian** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 9:52 am

well it's just all my drives are full of data

Not plannin to use drive in war scenario - merely for archiving

I heard some issues regarding resource forks - time stamping i think

this might not be an issue?

I just know that next week a terabyte will be half the price so spending da beer money unecesarily don't go down as well as the beer.....

actually have wiped another drive and archiving to a mac disk now- but i might experiment with this next week in a less volatile climate

emulatorloo · Post by **emulatorloo** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:13 am

martian wrote:well it's just all my drives are full of data

Not plannin to use drive in war scenario - merely for archiving

Well you could always archive on DVD-r.

at any rate here are some good cheapish but reliable ext firewire cases that have worked well for me on both my mac and win machine:

Firewire/USB combo:

http://www.dealsonic.com/bymecoidetof.html

Firewire only:

http://www.dealsonic.com/bytme3idetof.html

If I were you I would be tempted to make that 300gb drive a mac HFS+ drive and take one of my older smaller drives and format that as fat 32 for my windows work.

martian · Post by **martian** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:21 am

yeah I was trying that- but having to stay up too late

and once you get the foley in, and do the re-edit it's really easy to break the 4.3 barrier

I just did a save as - and then compacted

now saving as and duplicating audio - this should be ok for archivin right? like BTD should be right?

I've spent nearly 3 weeks working on this.......

Yeah I found pretty much the same solution - just a bit of data shunting and now we back on track

I did look at a la cie drive - it had firewire 800 on it - curious as I find there masy be issues on me firewire buss - don't want to crack the case on the g5 this week - deadline looms and everythin is goin well - tho paranoia backup scheme in operation.......

martian · Post by **martian** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:37 am

it's just that I want to do alternate drive backup's

drive A alternate day backup to drive b

but like i say hate spending fun' money on boring stuff...

not sure why I want to do this- DP has hardly crashed in a week - however having bein scorched by fire once.....

hucky · Post by **hucky** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 3:33 pm

For best performance and less problems in your workflow.
Partition the external drive in 4 partitions equal 70GB.
70 Gbyte should be ok for most project work.
use HFS for audio1, audio2, audio3 and FAT32 for audiobackup.
audio1 is your prefered partition for recording and heavy mixing
(fastest partition: access time, datarate).
after the first work copy audio1 to audio2 (findercopy).
continue your work on audio2 while audio1 is your backup copy
(tested) continue the same way to audio3.
use partition 4 (FAT32) audiobackup to share your files to other
computers (old macs, new and old windows, linux)
if you need more space use several external firewiredrives (or racks)
with the same prcedure.

hucky
making musicians work easy @ low cost and high performance.
we test everyday to let you play the other chords.

croyal · Post by **croyal** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:17 am

Sorry for the half-facetious answer before. But seriously, as you have surmised, FAT32 is not a greatway to reliably run Mac real-time apps.

However, since you are already in the situation, I would recommmend converting all the non-windows files to HFS+ on another drive on partition and leave the rest on the FAT32 drive.

For archiving I would definitely recommend using 2 different types of media (such as one set is HD and another is optical for example). With your current setup it would yield DVDs that only have Windows stuff and DVDs that only have Mac stuff- both DVD sets in a universal format (not Mac only). Of course you would also keep the Hard drives as the other type of backup.

Chris