USB hard drive - problem no. 1

1

1eyedjack

Geek Trainee
Patience please - not a techie here.

I have two external USB drives by WD. One called a "MyBook", 250Gb, pre-formatted as FAT32. One an "Elements" terrabyte drive, also pre-formatted as FAT32. Both have loads of free space, as does my laptop (XP Pro, hard disk formatted as NTFS).

I try to copy a 12Gb file from my laptop to either USB drive and it fails on the grounds that there is not enough disk space (there is enough).

I have a sneaky suspicion that the root cause is the difference between NTFS and FAT32. Would I be right, or is there another reason?

What is the largest file size that I should be able to transfer?

Is it possible to re-format the external drives as NTFS, and if so, are there any advantages and disadvantages to doing this? And if no disadvantages, why would WD sell them formatted as FAT32 in the first place?

Thanks for any insight.
 
Welcome to HWF :)

1eyedjack said:
I have a sneaky suspicion that the root cause is the difference between NTFS and FAT32. Would I be right, or is there another reason?
Click to expand...
FAT32 supports files up to 4 GB. You need an different file system, like NTFS to store files that are larger than 4 GB.
1eyedjack said:
Is it possible to re-format the external drives as NTFS, and if so, are there any advantages and disadvantages to doing this?
Click to expand...
Note the letter of the drive that Windows has assigned to the drive, and the name (label) of the drive. Then go to command prompt and enter the following command (X should be replaced by the letter of the drive):
Code: 
convert X: /fs:NTFS
It should now ask for the current label. Enter the name of the current drive label there (the one that you've noted). Then always enter Yes (Y).

There is going to be a problem when you format it back to FAT32. Windows won't help you with that because the maximum partition size of FAT32 is somewhere close to 50GB. So you need a 3rd party utility to use FAT32 again.

1eyedjack said:
why would WD sell them formatted as FAT32 in the first place?
Click to expand...
That is because FAT32 is supported on all Operating Systems. NTFS however is only built into Windows and not into other Operating Systems, like Linux and Mac OS X. And because also users of these systems might need an external hard disk, they use FAT32 by default.
 
That explains it. Thank you.

Does this mean that if I change to Linux for my next machine I am going to be limited to 4Gb file sizes, or is there some proprietory format specific to Linux, like NTFS is to Windows, which goes larger?
 
1eyedjack said:
Does this mean that if I change to Linux for my next machine I am going to be limited to 4Gb file sizes, or is there some proprietory format specific to Linux, like NTFS is to Windows, which goes larger?
Click to expand...
You can use Ext2, Ext3, JFS, XFS and some more file systems in Linux that support larger file sizes than 4 GB.
 
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