[WoD]

I intend to use a Firewire HHD to collaborate all of my music, video, image, and work data in one reasonably secure place. It will have to be compatble with Mac OS and Windows at a bare minimum, and ideally linux too.

If I format in Fat32 to allow for cross platform compatibility will this cause any adverse affects in read/write performance in Mac OS over the native filesystem?

Also, is it possible to partition a FireWire HDD, install linux, and boot from it? Putting linux on my mini without actually putting it ON my mini would be quite fun.

I realise now, that with only Firewire 400 at its disposal the external drive is only marginally faster than the internal, has anyone tried it out and gained any real-world experience of whether this "marginal" speed increase actually does make a difference. When working with huge files in InDesign/Photoshop any speed increase is welcome.


...Some time passes...

Okay, I seem to have partially answered one of my questions and raised even more - Mac OS only supports Fat32 partitions up to 128ish GB. And Windows XP can only format Fat32 partitions up to 32gb (I am sure that is nonsense!). So I will need to split the 250gb into two separate partitions which will ultimately be about 120gb, give or take.

Has anyone has any experience with doing this in XP? Looks like I will need a third party formatting utility to handle such big partitions. Any suggestions?

Thanks.

...More time passes...

Hopefully these findings will be useful to someone here (although this topic is currently in the wrong forum, sorry!).

I think I have found the way to maintain good cross compatibility whilst keeping one large partition (I hate splitting up disks into small chunks, or any chunks for that matter).

1. Format the whole disk as Mac OS Extended

2. Grab MacDrive 6 (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6)

3. Install MacDrive 6 on home wintel computers.. naturally

4. Stick a 32mb CF card permenantly in the CF slot of the WD Media Center and stick the MacDrive 6 install.. and any other handy utilities (Like MacDisk - www.macdisk.com).. onto it.

Now when I take the hard disk to a friend's house I can simply plug it in, temporarily install MacDrive/Disk from the CF card, read/write from the main hard drive and uninstall MacDrive/Disk when I am done, or leave it there for future use.

I will also be able to dump my standard "Missionary" utilities on the CF card or hard disk - namely Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, Miranda IM and OpenOffice.org for quick installs on unsuspecting computers as I dance my merry anti-microsoft way across the globe. La lala!

Finally - has anyone had any experience with MacDrive 6 and MacDisk - I assume they both do what they say on the tin, but are there any stability issues and what is the speed like? I will be doing a one-off copy of my entire music/video/image collection onto the external disk from a windows computer so I would like it to be pretty fast to get that job out of the way - from then on most of the read/write operations will be done by Mac OS serving files through the network and saving tons of downloads and other new rubbish to it.

[Calli46]

Hi WoD,

Long post you got there... If you go the Firewire road, I hope you realize that while new and not so new Macs have Firewire interfaces, it's not the same with most PCs. Most of them don't come with Firewire but only USB 2 as external interface, unless your friends have bought Firewire PCI cards to put in their PCs. So much for PC-Mac connectivity using Firewire .

Are you sure about the 32 GB partition limit with FAT32 and WinXP ? As much as I can remember, there is no such limit in WinXP, but I may be mistaken on this one...

I have also a limited experience using MacDrive on a PC. I used it for a little more than a year, but only to read Mac formatted floppies. For this, MacDrive was a champ! Never had a problem with it, but I never tried it with a Mac hard drive. So what about it's speed with drives, I don't know.

All in all, to connect your external drive with many different PCs, your best bet would have been a USB 2 enclosure or a USB 2-Firewire combo enclosure. Right now, I'm looking for such a beast. They are available for about 30 $ to 70 $, without the drive, of course.

[WoD]

Well, mine is USB 2.0 / Firewire. So far I have successfully used it on USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and Firewire. My PC has USB 2.0 and Firewire, and so do mine and my girlfriends laptops (although they are 4pin, so I bought an additional cable from Ebuyer).

USB 2.0 to an external HFS+ formatted hard disk is pretty damned fast to say the least, MacDrive seems to have almost no overhead and I never expected it to work so well and so seemlessly.

On USB 1.1 the drive is dog slow, I found it quicker to copy over the network and then subsequently onto the drive. Suffice to say I now have most of my media files and important CD images onto the drive, all via MacDrive.

The final test, of course, is to plug it into my mini (if/when it arrives this evening) and test to see if the MacDrive formatted partitions are fully supported and functional with OSX.

MacDrive is a hell of a lot better and faster than I expected and after thinking about it a bit, I suppose it makes sense - why should an HFS driver be any slower than an NTFS if it is produced to at least a reasonable degree of quality.

There is, I believe a 32gb limit from WITHIN XP - ie; the disk manager. I did try and format a couple of 115gb partitions with it and anything above 32gb causes the Fat32 option in the filesystem drop down to vanish. Fat32 is not a great choice of filesystem for any OS, so keeping it in HFS as a full 250gb was probably the best choice.

As for portability, I have a compact flash card inserted in the CF slot which I will almost never use otherwise- it has the MacDrive install on it which I can then temporarily install on any computers I need to move data to.

Thanks for your feedback.