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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Hard drive limitations

drmacintosh - Mar 24, 2007 - 9:45 pm

I am running "Tiger" Mac OSX v10.4.9 on an Intel Core Duo Mac mini 1.66 GHz combo drive with the default 60 GB HD and upgraded 2 GB of RAM. Attached is a 100 GB 7200 RPM Segate High Speed USB 2.0 HD that is being shuffled between a Macintosh and Windows computer. For the drive to be usable on both I had to format the drive as "FAT32". The problem is that eventhough the drive can be written to and read from on the Macintosh side, only up to a maximum of 4GB can be copied to and from the drive. Is there any work around to that where more than 4GB can be accessed? Knowing that NTFS does not have any limitations whatsoever, "Tiger" can only read from but not write to NTFS formatted drives. Can anything be said whether the upcoming release of "Leopard" OSX v10.5 will read and write NTFS formatted HDs. In the meantime is there any work around to this limitation?

DeltaMac - Mar 24, 2007 - 10:21 pm

You can certainly write more than 4GB to a FAT32 drive. The limit is 4GB for one file. If you are sharing large videos, or other files larger than 4GB, there is no work around for the limitation for FAT32.

Microsoft is not sharing the secrets for read and write to NTFS to other file systems. We'll wait and see if Leopard gets closer to cracking the mysteries of NTFS.

Here's one work-around. Format your drive as MacOS Extended, and install the MacDrive software on each PC that needs to use that drive. It's not free software, unfortunately, but it will take care of the problem.
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/