External hard Drive

aiolosaiolos
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
So my friend made me a nice external drive drive with about 233 GB of space... and it was the method of buying an enclosure and putting a hard drive inside. I ran windows on my MBP, and I went to the properties, but I could not find the speed of the hard drive. Anyone know if there is a way to find it with windows? or do I need to download a freeware tool?



Thanks in advance for help.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    ricksbrainricksbrain Posts: 517member
    Based on it's size, it's 5200 or less. Otherwise, I'm no help, sorry...
  • Reply 2 of 8
    aiolosaiolos Posts: 228member
    ok guys, I opened up the enclosure and did the research on the hard drive, and it is in fact a 7200 rpm drive from western digital, so it's a pretty sweet hard drive. My only problem is that I can read and write from windows by I can only read from mac osx, and that's gonna be a problem. Does anyone know why that happening and if there is a solution?



    Thanks.
  • Reply 3 of 8
    benzenebenzene Posts: 338member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by aiolos


    ok guys, I opened up the enclosure and did the research on the hard drive, and it is in fact a 7200 rpm drive from western digital, so it's a pretty sweet hard drive. My only problem is that I can read and write from windows by I can only read from mac osx, and that's gonna be a problem. Does anyone know why that happening and if there is a solution?



    Thanks.



    Most likely it's because the disk is formatted NTFS. Macintoshes can only read from NTFS file systems. If you want to be able to read and write to the disk from both OSes, you'll need to format it as FAT32. Unfortunately, FAT32 can only address drives up to 128GB in size (and windows can only format FAT32 drives 32GB or less in size).



    There are 3rd party fixes for both Macs and PCs, but I don't know much about these.
  • Reply 4 of 8
    aiolosaiolos Posts: 228member
    could I then format part of the drive to fat32 for mac storage/back-up, and leave the rest for windows?
  • Reply 5 of 8
    benzenebenzene Posts: 338member
    Yep, as long as it's within the size limits I mentioned.
  • Reply 6 of 8
    jodyjody Posts: 4member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by benzene


    Most likely it's because the disk is formatted NTFS. Macintoshes can only read from NTFS file systems. If you want to be able to read and write to the disk from both OSes, you'll need to format it as FAT32. Unfortunately, FAT32 can only address drives up to 128GB in size (and windows can only format FAT32 drives 32GB or less in size).



    There are 3rd party fixes for both Macs and PCs, but I don't know much about these.



    Sorry if this is a dumb question, but if FAT32 is the format that Macs read/write to, and FAT32 can only address drives up to 128GB, then how is a 250GB drive formatted for Mac use? I ask b/c I'm about to buy an external HD, probably a Seagate, and I think it will come formatted as NTFS, so I will have to reformat it before I can use it with my MBP. This will be my first external HD, so I'm new to all of this...
  • Reply 7 of 8
    benzenebenzene Posts: 338member
    FAT32 is a format Macs can read/write from. There's about half a dozen or so you can choose from, but you're problem lies in the fact that whatever format you choose also has to be mountable by a PC.

    FAT32 fills that requirement, but is inherently limited, not only in size, but in error correction and fragmentation susceptibility.



    The 250GB drive is likely HFS+ formatted.



    What you want to do with the external HD depends on what OS you'll use the most. If you're going to primarily use it on a Mac, make one 200GB partition HFS+, and another 50GB partition FAT32.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    jodyjody Posts: 4member
    Thanks!
Sign In or Register to comment.