Re: USB Drive - Newbie Question

On Thu, 9 Jul 2009 04:59:54 -0400, Henry Flam wrote
(in article <hflam-52BCA0.01595309072009@[74.223.185.199.nw.nuvox.net]>):

I've never used a thumb drive before, so bear with me. When I looked at
the Get Info about the drive I found that it's formatted for MS-DOS
(FAT16).

FAT16 has several significant limitations. These include:

1 you can't have too many items in the root directory. If you have more than
255 or 511, can't remember which, the logical volume will report that it is
full, no matter how much free space is actually available.

2 you can't have large files on the volume. A 'large file' is a file larger
than 1 or 2 GB, can't remember which.

3 you're not supposed to have a FAT16 volume larger than 16 GB.

FAT32 eases those limitations. It might be a good idea to reformat the volume
FAT32. Note that while Windows XP and Vista can read and write to volumes
formatted FAT32 which are larger than 32 GB, they cannot _create_ a FAT32
volume larger than 32 GB. OS X can read/write FAT16 and FAT32 volumes, and
can format FAT32 volumes larger than 32 GB.

NTFS removes most limitations, and has much better security features as well.
It would be a good idea to set the thumb drive to NTFS; there is a feature
under Disk Management in both XP and Vista will will allow users to change
the file system from FAT to NTFS without reformatting. It cannot be reversed
except by reformatting the logical volume.

I'm planning to use to place some software and jpegs on the
drive then send it, by mail, to a friend who has a Mac. Does this mean
that I have to re-format it for the Mac, before my friend can download
the content of the drive on his Mac?

No. OS X can read/write FAT16 and FAT32 volumes, and can read NTFS volumes
out of the box and there are several free or cheap utilities which allow OS X
to write NTFS. (See further MacFUSE)

Where can I find the tool to do the
formatting? Just for information, I'm running the latest version of
Leopard, if that's of significance.

Applications/Utilities/Drive Utility will reformat the thumb drive to FAT32,
NTFS, or to OS X's HTFS+. Launch DU, select the volume you want to reformat,
select 'Erase', select the file system from the drop-down menu, go.

--
email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.

.

Relevant Pages

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