Formatting external hard drives to native file systems may allow them to work optimumly

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Using external drives to save space on your Mac? Format them first. | MacFixIt – CNET Reviews

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External hard disk

A typical external hard disk

This article highlighted the benefits of formatting external hard disks that are to be connected to an Apple Macintosh as HFS+ file-system disks. This advice hails well for formatting an external hard disk to an operating system’s native file-system such as NTFS for Windows or ext3 for Linux. This is because most of the external hard disks come preformatted to FAT32 more as an interchangeable file system that can be used on Windows, Macintosh and UNIX/Linux.

In the context of an external hard disk that you attach to a network-attached storage device for extra capacity, it may be worth looking through the instruction manual for your NAS or router to find the optimum file system. Some of the NAS units may work with ext3 or NTFS as the file system whereas most, including the routers with NAS functionality will stay with FAT32.

But this situation would apply to external hard disks that are primarily connected to the host computer all of the time rather than the “portable” hard disks that are likely to be moved between different computers and file systems. It wouldn’t hold well with thumb-drives and memory cards that you would expect to move between various computer devices including specific-purpose devices because most of these devices would only know the common FAT32 file-system.

This advice is best applied with an external hard disk that you have just purchased rather than one that contains all of your data because a format routine can wipe all of the data that exists on the hard disk.

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