Hot-swap?

July 13, 2005 3:47 AM

Hopefully simple question about hot-swapping between PCs and Macs.

So I bought an 80GB USB 2.0 Firelite drive. Before I start using it in earnest, I'm wondering whether it can be used on both PCs and Macs without any problems. The drive will normally be moved between two PCs running XP, but there's the possibility of also plugging it into an OSX G5. All my directories, etc., will be set up on a PC. My question is, what will happen when I plug the drive into the USB port on a Mac keyboard (and is this USB 2.0)? Will filenames, etc., be unaffected?

posted by jonathanbell to computers & internet (8 comments total)

yes! I finally get to use the knowledge I learned in college! This will work fine if the drive is formatted with the fat32 file system. I don't believe it will work on the Mac if it is in NTFS. Happy swapping!
posted by Mark5four0 at 5:23 AM on July 13, 2005

Yes, the drive will work in both, please keep it in FAT32.
posted by k8t at 5:31 AM on July 13, 2005

And make sure, when you move it back to the PC, that you don't delete any of the new, oddly named files which have mysteriously appeared. Your Mac will be using them as part of the file system and if they disappear you'll be back to where you started.

</bitter experience>
posted by NinjaPirate at 5:53 AM on July 13, 2005

also dont use the USB port on the keyboard (and yes it is USB 2.0) it wont have enough power to run the drive. if its a powermac (ie tower) use the convientent USB port on the front of the machine. if its a iMac G5, obviously you will have to reach around the back. but in my experience i have never had luck connecting something "big" to the keyboard USB. leave that for low power peripherals.
posted by ShawnString at 6:48 AM on July 13, 2005

NTFS will work but will be unwritable on the Mac.

Installing MacDrive will allow the drive to be a mac drive and work on the PC (has to be formatted on the mac.

Fat32's biggest disadvantage is files sizers are <4gb.
posted by filmgeek at 7:03 AM on July 13, 2005

Thanks to everyone for their answers. I'm guessing it came pre-formatted in FAT32 - is that the most likely configuration? And thanks for the warning that the Mac might create a scattering of system files... I'll look after them.
posted by jonathanbell at 8:33 AM on July 13, 2005

Also, isn't there a limit to the size a Fat32 drive can be? I thought it was something like 32GB but I might be wrong. So you may have to partition that drive and format all partitions as Fat32.
posted by inviolable at 1:03 PM on July 13, 2005

FAT32 theoretically allows for drive sizes up to 2 terabytes.

However, due to limitations in Microsoft's scandisk utility, the FAT is not allowed to grow beyond 124.55 gigabytes, unless "scandisk" is not needed. Windows 2000 and XP placed a limit on the size of FAT32 partitions they can create at 32 GB, Microsoft says this is by design but does not explain why, and those versions of Windows are quite capable of reading and writing larger FAT32 partitions created by other means.

The maximum possible file size for a FAT32 volume is 4 GB, and that gets pretty annoying.

The real pain in the ass is the way shit gets fragmented and corrupted on FAT32 drives (because they aren't jounaled in the slightest), especially when juggled between computers.

On Mac compatibility: If you need to do backups to the drive, or drag anything but normal documents to it (i.e. Applications and such), do so using .dmg disk images. HFS+ on the mac has essentially no limits on filenames or unique-to-the-mac .app shit (Only charachter disallowed is ':'). This causes problems on occasion when copying to FAT32, which is rife with disallowed characters and truncated filenames.

It might be good to partition a piece of it off as HFS+ and add software to your PC to read it.
posted by blasdelf at 12:11 AM on July 14, 2005