WPR Mac Help

After the show, Jane from Green Bay sent in a question.

She wants to save very large files, such as video based projects, to her external hard drives. But once the files hit about 4 Gigabytes (GB), lots of Bad Things® start to happen.

Typically, when you buy an external hard drive, it’s set up to work for the largest possible audience. So they “format” the drive using a setting called “FAT32″, which means it will work on most any PC or Mac. The problem is, when they’re set up this generically, you miss out on all the features that a platform specific setup would give you.

Here’s how you fix this.

If the drive is going to be used on a PC with Windows 2000/XP on it, you should use the format called NTFS. But if you were using a PC, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog.

On a Mac, the best possible format to use for a drive is called “HFS+” or sometimes called “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.

Great! Mac OS Extended it is! But how?

First, make sure if there’s anything important on that drive that you back it up. We’re about to erase it and start from scratch.

Head on over to your Applications folder, and go into Utilities. Open up “Disk Utility”. You should see your external hard drive listed over to the LH side. Click on it and look for the “Erase” tab. You should see an option for “Mac OS Extened (Journaled)”.

Go ahead and erase the disk. It will warn you about the impending doom any data currently on that disk faces. When you’re done, you’ll have a disk that can accommodate files in the terabyte range. (That’s really really really big, in technical terms. ) As an added bonus, the drive will probably be faster and give you fewer “odd” errors.

The downside is that the drive is no longer readable on a PC. Microsoft doesn’t have much interest in making the PC speak Mac. And the reason that OS X can’t write to the more advanced Windows NTFS file system? Microsoft hasn’t really been very forthcoming with the specs on that. The only reason we can read from it is it’s been largely reverse engineered.

So how do you get really large files between platforms? For that, you need to look at either a high powered server or a Storage Area Network (SAN). Both of those are pretty far outside of what can be covered here.