For those who have no interest in technical talk, move onwards…
So I bought a 320GB external awhile ago which was an amazing purchase to accommodate my heavy television show downloading habits, as well as my live Smashing Pumpkins archive that I am building (which…may not be needed anymore now that the official archive.org project has begun allowing uploads? Hmm…maybe I should get rid of them…). I love the hard drive and the portability factor. I got this idea from Philipp since he had a laptop and I figured I would pick one up later on in life and would like a portable hard drive.
So I did end up picking up a MacBook last year which is great but I realized that I couldn’t write information to my hard drive for some reason.
After some research, I found out that the thing was formatted in NTFS which doesn’t allow Mac’s to write to the drive. They can read, but they can’t write. So I realized I had to format the entire drive into FAT32.
This posed a problem because there was no easy way to take off 280GB of information off of my external hard drive considering I didn’t have another drive handy.
Lo and behold, the heavens parted and Mike ended up picking up a 320GB hard drive WITH NETWORK CONNECTION (!!!) so I spent yesterday transferring the data, formatting the drive and transferring back. The entire process took about 12 hours I would figure.
So my issue is the fact that someone needs to get out there and make a new file system which is a global standard so we don’t end up in these situations! It would be highly convenient if I didn’t have to go through this process again!
4 replies on “Geekspeak: Hard Drives”
I knew I shouldn’t have read this…now my non-geeky brain hurts! lol
lol,
There are TONS of filesystems out there (most of them already open standards)
It is tough to make a file system that isn’t open, if you want other operating systems to be able to access your filesystem you have to open up the specs for others.
Linux and Mac will read and write to all of them, with the exception of the windows NTFS filesystem.
NTFS is a closed filesystem and the specs for the filesystem are (according to wikipedia) a Microsoft “trade secret”.
Windows on the other hand will only read and write to a few natively.
NTFS, FAT, and EFS, that I know of.
So had you been using ANY other filesystem you would have been fine, but NTFS is the only one your MAC would have problems with.
NTFS is a much more secure file system than FAT 32 , but the MAC system’s OS is more secure than the the Microcrap OS. so nothing to worry about.
NTFS offers little in the way of security on a portable HD.
On a portable HD the files are just as accessible on FAT and NTFS if you plug them into another machine, anyone with admin rights to that machine would then have access to the files.
Also, on a linux or MAC you would have access to read all of the files as well, but writing is a difficult process, newer linux kernels do have full read and write access.
Although, on a single machine (or networked PC) NTFS would allow a granular control of the access rights of the files per user.