Stefan Srdic wrote:
I purchased a USB 2.0 hdd enclosure along with a 80GB toshiba laptop harddrive. I plan on using this USB HDD for storing large media files. Ialso plan on using this enclosure to facilitate the transfer of files between my laptop and other PC's.Which file system would be best suitable for cross platform compatibility?For the most part, I share with Winblows PC's. Do microsoft OSes use vfat for accessing USB storage devices?
Win2000 and XP will allow either FAT32 (vfat for Linux) or NTFS, although if you happened to try to format the drive from one of these OS's it will try to force you to use NTFS for any sector larger than 32 GB. But you can you format the drive using a different tool, and these OSes will accept it afterwards.
I did recently have a problem, though, with downloading large Bittorrent files to my FAT32-formatted 120 GB hard drive, which kept having write errors. But if I downloaded the files to a smaller sector on my internal drive and then just copied the files to the USB drive later on for storage, there was no problem.
Chuck --------------------------- Charles Muller Toyo Gakuen University Faculty of Humanities 1660 Hiregasaki, Nagareyama-shi Chiba 270-0161 JAPAN Mobile Phone: 090-9310-1787 Web Site: Resources for East Asian Language and Thought http://www.acmuller.net <acmuller[at]jj.em-net.ne.jp>