external HDDs...

[kanpeki_chan]

I'm not good with computers, so pls bare with me even if the following question might be silly /just making sure ^^''
So, I was thinking of buying an external HDD for my laptop /as I currently only have 80Gbs worth of HDD.. which is obviously not enough.. x.x
My question(s) is (are) : my internal HDD is a 5400rpm S-ATA drive.. can I get an external HDD that's faster than that, or will it cause me some kind of trouble? I plan to use the external HDD for storing uncompressed files and such /basically, for my new projects.. Also, will the computer run slower if the programs I'm using are installed on the internal HDD, but the files I need to process are on the external one?

Thanks for your assistance and good will ! ^^''

[kanpeki_chan]

p.s. : I don't have a Mac right now, but I've been thinking about getting one in the future, so I've been reading stuff on the net about it.. As far as I understand, one can only add an external HDD to a Mac if the said HDD is formatted with the Fat32 file system /which limits the file size..
bla bla bla.../ Anyway, my question would be /just for future reference/ : do you guys know any way of going round the whole formatting thing when dealing with a Mac /thus keeping the HDD NTFS/ ?

[Qyot27]

My question(s) is (are) : my internal HDD is a 5400rpm S-ATA drive.. can I get an external HDD that's faster than that, or will it cause me some kind of trouble?

Nope. The first HDD I used externally was 7200rpm while the one in my computer was 5400rpm. You're more to be limited by the fact you'll be restricted to USB 2.0 transfer speeds than by the rpm difference between the main and external drive.

If you'd prefer to have the faster drive in the computer itself, just buy a regular 7200rpm internal drive and an external enclosure, clone (or completely reinstall from scratch) your existing system onto the 7200rpm drive and use that as your main drive instead. Then you can slap the 5400rpm drive in the enclosure and use it for storage purposes. Or buy two 7200rpm drives and 2 enclosures and use the 5400rpm drive for non-important storage (the one I mentioned as being in my setup is now used to store my digital music collection, and both my main and editing drives are 7200rpm).

Also, will the computer run slower if the programs I'm using are installed on the internal HDD, but the files I need to process are on the external one?

Generally, you probably won't notice the difference, if any. Like I said before, the transfer speed of USB 2.0 is more important there.

p.s. : I don't have a Mac right now, but I've been thinking about getting one in the future, so I've been reading stuff on the net about it.. As far as I understand, one can only add an external HDD to a Mac if the said HDD is formatted with the Fat32 file system /which limits the file size..
bla bla bla.../ Anyway, my question would be /just for future reference/ : do you guys know any way of going round the whole formatting thing when dealing with a Mac /thus keeping the HDD NTFS/ ?

OS X can sort of handle NTFS, but it gets finicky sometimes (at least as far as Tiger is concerned; hopefully Leopard/Snow Leopard has improved support). There were times that it wouldn't even recognize my NTFS drive when I turned it on. Other times, it worked fine.

However, that situation can be averted by installing NTFS-3G for Mac OS X - after doing that, my drive is detected every single time, without fail.

Generally speaking, though, it is advisable to use FAT32 if you're going to be working across operating systems. The alternate solution would be to install the proper HFS/HFS+ drivers so Windows can read Mac volumes (or if Linux, the proper ext2/3 or maybe ReiserFS support, although Reiser doesn't have Windows filesystem drivers, IIRC). Like I said, because Windows, Mac, and Linux all recognize FAT32 volumes without additional software, that is the easiest cross-platform option.

[Kionon]

My question(s) is (are) : my internal HDD is a 5400rpm S-ATA drive.. can I get an external HDD that's faster than that, or will it cause me some kind of trouble?

Nope. The first HDD I used externally was 7200rpm while the one in my computer was 5400rpm. You're more to be limited by the fact you'll be restricted to USB 2.0 transfer speeds than by the rpm difference between the main and external drive.

If you'd prefer to have the faster drive in the computer itself, just buy a regular 7200rpm internal drive and an external enclosure, clone (or completely reinstall from scratch) your existing system onto the 7200rpm drive and use that as your main drive instead. Then you can slap the 5400rpm drive in the enclosure and use it for storage purposes. Or buy two 7200rpm drives and 2 enclosures and use the 5400rpm drive for non-important storage (the one I mentioned as being in my setup is now used to store my digital music collection, and both my main and editing drives are 7200rpm).

Also, will the computer run slower if the programs I'm using are installed on the internal HDD, but the files I need to process are on the external one?

Generally, you probably won't notice the difference, if any. Like I said before, the transfer speed of USB 2.0 is more important there.

On OS X? Even on Leopard/Snow Leopard? Unfortunately, yes. USB is considerably slower than firewire. So I wouldn't even mess around here with a USB enclosure, I would go straight to a combination of SATA/Firewire. Also, if you're going to get into cloning and testing OS configurations, firewire is great, because you can boot off of them, but OS X has no support for booting off USB (and why would you want to, egad, it would be slow).

p.s. : I don't have a Mac right now, but I've been thinking about getting one in the future, so I've been reading stuff on the net about it.. As far as I understand, one can only add an external HDD to a Mac if the said HDD is formatted with the Fat32 file system /which limits the file size..
bla bla bla.../ Anyway, my question would be /just for future reference/ : do you guys know any way of going round the whole formatting thing when dealing with a Mac /thus keeping the HDD NTFS/ ?

OS X can sort of handle NTFS, but it gets finicky sometimes (at least as far as Tiger is concerned; hopefully Leopard/Snow Leopard has improved support). There were times that it wouldn't even recognize my NTFS drive when I turned it on. Other times, it worked fine.

However, that situation can be averted by installing NTFS-3G for Mac OS X - after doing that, my drive is detected every single time, without fail.

Leo still needs fuse, if I recall correctly, although my prefpanes don't show it, and I haven't needed to check in a while, since I am mac at home and at work. Snow Leo (I have it running great on my MacBook White, and I just lurv it ) appears to have MacFuse included from the get go. It is in my prefpanes, and I certainly did not install it by choice. Disk Utility even gave me the option of formatting a drive in NTFS, if I so wished. I still would recommend if you're going to go mac, go mac all the way and use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) on all your drives. Unless you need to bring your project files with you cross-platform for work or school, there just isn't a reason to use NTFS at all.

Generally speaking, though, it is advisable to use FAT32 if you're going to be working across operating systems. The alternate solution would be to install the proper HFS/HFS+ drivers so Windows can read Mac volumes (or if Linux, the proper ext2/3 or maybe ReiserFS support, although Reiser doesn't have Windows filesystem drivers, IIRC). Like I said, because Windows, Mac, and Linux all recognize FAT32 volumes without additional software, that is the easiest cross-platform option.

With FAT32 you are limited to files under 4GBs. This is a problem for many of my footage files. FAT32 just wouldn't be practical for me, and in short order, it won't be practical for most people who wish to actually keep high quality, lossless rips around for extended periods of time. Again, unless you absolutely, positively require cross-platform compatibility, I just don't see the point.

[Qyot27]

On OS X? Even on Leopard/Snow Leopard? Unfortunately, yes. USB is considerably slower than firewire. So I wouldn't even mess around here with a USB enclosure, I would go straight to a combination of SATA/Firewire. Also, if you're going to get into cloning and testing OS configurations, firewire is great, because you can boot off of them, but OS X has no support for booting off USB (and why would you want to, egad, it would be slow).

I thought that part was referring to Windows. I've not seen too many Windows-based vendors tout IEEE-1394 support, through whatever brandname they choose to use.

With FAT32 you are limited to files under 4GBs. This is a problem for many of my footage files. FAT32 just wouldn't be practical for me, and in short order, it won't be practical for most people who wish to actually keep high quality, lossless rips around for extended periods of time. Again, unless you absolutely, positively require cross-platform compatibility, I just don't see the point.

Thinking about it, how's the support for ext2? Granted it's a tad more esoteric than FAT32, but it allows a maximum filesize of 16 GiB, and is still the recommended version of ext to use on Flash-based media, because ext3 requires too many disk writes due to journaling (ext4 also has journaling, so it's probably out-of-the-question too). And I know that Windows can easily be made to support it, if need be.

[Kionon]

I thought that part was referring to Windows. I've not seen too many Windows-based vendors tout IEEE-1394 support, through whatever brandname they choose to use.

Ah, I thought the entire post was a "if I go mac, what should I do in situation X..." question. In which case, I would never advise USB. And if the original poster is thinking that switching is a definite possibility in the foreseeable future, might as well get the firewire drives/enclosures now anyhow.

...Sony. I originally started editing on VAIOs at home specifically because even the cheapest VAIOs advertised as having something to do with video editing had firewire.

Thinking about it, how's the support for ext2? Granted it's a tad more esoteric than FAT32, but it allows a maximum filesize of 16 GiB, and is still the recommended version of ext to use on Flash-based media, because ext3 requires too many disk writes due to journaling (ext4 also has journaling, so it's probably out-of-the-question too). And I know that Windows can easily be made to support it, if need be.

Snow Leo is quite amazing. It has out of the box support for NTFS as mentioned above, as well as ext2/3 and I believe 4 as well. All can be mounted read/write.

[NeoQuixotic]

I'd get an external hard drive or enclosure that has multiple connections. This way you have plenty of options depending on what machine you are using it on. The best connection would be eSATA, next FireWire 800, then FireWire 400, and finally USB 2.0 at the bottom. If you don't have an eSATA or FireWire port, you can get an add-on card for a PCMCIA slot or an ExpressCard. Actually, I would be concerned about a PCMCIA card adapter even providing enough bandwidth for FireWire and especially eSATA. And of course Apple, in all it's brilliance decided to remove the ExpressCard from the new MacBook Pros and replaced it with a SD card reader. Well, they did keep it on the 17" model with a base price of $2500. Oh, and they downgraded the SATA interface too, except on the 17". As much as I love Apple, they do a lot of stupid things and find ways to charge you a small fortune. But I'm dead set on getting a Mac Pro for my next computer.

To access Mac formated drives on Windows you can also get MacDrive. Yeah its not free, but it works nicely. Having NTFS read and write now in OS X Snow Leopard will be nice and so will having HFS+ drivers in Boot Camp. Now if someone can grab that driver for anyone to install, you won't even need MacDrive.