HFS+ yields advantage for Mac users?

October 29, 2007 11:13 AM

When using an external hard-drive with a Mac, is a speed advantage gained by using a drive formatted with HFS+ (over FAT32/etc.)? And while I'm asking...

...can anyone recommend a good, quiet small & preferably-power-cable-free external firewire drive for my iBook?

posted by wavejumper to computers & internet (11 answers total)

With regards to the external drive, I have this MacAlly enclosure for my iBook and it works very well. USB/Firewire, quiet, small, no power cables needed. Just put in a 2.5" laptop drive of your choice.
posted by jaimev at 11:31 AM on October 29, 2007

I have that enclosure, and it works fine. I think the drive I put into it is about to go, but that's another story.
posted by oaf at 11:33 AM on October 29, 2007

AFAIK there is no speed avantage, but you'll be able to read the FAT32 drive with most Windows PCs as well as Macs.
posted by Gungho at 11:33 AM on October 29, 2007

One thing to note is that maximum file size for a FAT32 volume (that is how large a single file can be) is 4Gig. If you think you'll ever break that limit, go HFS+.

HFS+ can also give you journaling (which prevents the possiblity of full scale drive corruption if the power fails during a write) and I beleive it less prone to fragmentation than FAT32.

From a speed perspective fragmentation is bad. If it was me and I was sure I wouldn't be using the drive to transfer files to a PC, I'd use HFS+. Also, Time Machine will only backup to HFS+ drives.
posted by mge at 11:37 AM on October 29, 2007

FAT32 is a simpler structure and could, in theory, be faster. However, the extra computation overhead of HFS+ versus FAT32 is irrelevant next to actual drive I/O overhead. Go with HFS+ unless you need the interoperability. The journaling and unlimited file sizes are worth it.
posted by chairface at 11:42 AM on October 29, 2007

If you're trying to make a bootable backup, I'm pretty sure you have to go the HFS+ route.
posted by schustafa at 12:01 PM on October 29, 2007

Since others have dealt with the filesystem issue, I'll chime in to recommend Western Digital's Passport line - I'm using one right now at work to host VM images, and I've been very happy with it. One unfortunate note about a lot of 2.5" drives that take their power from USB ports instead of having a power brick is that most ship with only a single-ended USB cable, but many older laptops need a double-ended one because they don't provide enough power from a single port. I had to call WD and have them mail me a new cable to get my drive working with my old Dell Latitude D800 - but my much-more-recent HP laptop has plenty of power out of a single port.
posted by Tomorrowful at 12:08 PM on October 29, 2007

The Mac OS (and the big-time Apple apps) is heavily optimized for HFS/HFS+. If you're really a speed freak, turn Journaling off (but realize this means the drive might be corrupted if you unplug it or the power goes out during a write).

Unless you have some reason to use a different format, use it; it's the default for a reason.

I can't speak personally to external drive cases, but if you value your hard drives just make sure you get one that does automatic spin-down -- otherwise (unless you are good about unmounting and turning off the drive when not in use), you will chew through drives rather quickly. Most drives are not made for 24/7/365 spun-up use (SCSI server drives are probably the exception). I have had drives start to fail and develop squealing bearings after just a few weeks of life in a crappy unventilated no-spin-down enclosure.

I think some of the enclosures from more reputable manufacturers (Lacie, MacAlly) will do spin-down, or at least they ought to tell you if they don't. But most of the crummy generic-brand ones don't. It also seems to be more common to find on Firewire boxes than on USB ones.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:25 PM on October 29, 2007

while we're on this subject, is there a free Windows tool to recognize HFS+ volumes? i would love to run HFS+ on all my removable drives with my home Mac and be able to use them on my office PC.

Sorry if this is offtopic and threadjacky...delete if needed.
posted by uaudio at 12:53 PM on October 29, 2007

While I realize there's probably extra overhead for the special purpose, my iPod-on-Mac mounts and copies files much much MUCH faster now that it's formatted as HFS+. (It used to be Fat32 so I could use sync it from my Windows iTunes computer, but I'm trying to get Windows out of my house these days.)

On the related topic: the only HFS-mounted-in-Windows tool I know is MacDrive, but it is not free ($50).
posted by rokusan at 2:44 PM on October 29, 2007

Well, one thing to know is if you wanted to do a bare-bones OS install on the external drive (so you could boot OS X from it in an emergency), it'd have to be HFS+.

The other advantage of using HFS+ on the Mac is that you will be able to use all of the excellent disk optimization / disk repair / data recovery software available for OS X. I swear by Diskwarrior and Data Rescue 2, personally.

As far as I know, the only OS X utility software that'll touch a FAT32 volume is (ironically) Apple's own "Disk Utility", which ships as part of OS X. Even that one's pretty limited in its FAT32 tools (vs HFS+).
posted by churl at 3:37 PM on October 29, 2007