Drive time

It was time for an external hard drive. Hard drives are getting bigger and cheaper rapidly, and I had need of one for two reasons:

1. Doing video editing on files stored on a network drive for my post production class is seriously painful. Playback halts periodically and just editing files becomes excrutiating when everybody else in the class is trying to work on their stuff too. With file sizes around 5GB, storing in my regular student space isn’t an option.
2. I’m planning on getting a laptop in a few months so not having to be moving stuff around would be very nice.

With those things in mind I ordered an enclosure and hard drive from New Egg, which arrived in the mail today. With tool-less installation it took about 10 minutes to put together, and most of that was figuring out where to plug in the internal cables since I’ve never used a SATA drive before.

Far more time was spent in formatting the drive. In the Windows drive management control panel I only had the option of NTFS, but then I figured that wouldn’t work if I got a MacBook and planned on writing to the drive (apparently because the file system is a trade secret of Microsoft). Okay, FAT32 it is, so I open up my favorite command window and start formatting before I leave for class. I come back to find a helpful error message informing me that FAT32 is limited to 32GB. Thanks for letting me know ahead of time, format command! According to Wikipedia:

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 filesystems of any size, but the format program on these platforms can only create FAT32 filesystems up to 32GB. Thompson and Thompson (2003) write that “Bizarrely, Microsoft states that this behavior is by design.” Microsoft’s knowledge base article 184006 indeed confirms the limitation and the by design statement, but gives no rationale or explanation. Peter Norton’s opinion is that “Microsoft has intentionally crippled the FAT32 file system.”

I love you too, Microsoft.

Following this revelation I tried out many different formatting programs but they either observed Microsoft’s stupid 32GB limit or wouldn’t let me format without forking over some money. After much despair I found the FAT 32 Formatter which worked in a few seconds (no problems so far, anyway). Hopefully anyone who stumbles upon this page with the same issues I encountered will find that program to their liking.
It seems that the file size limit for FAT32 is 4GB so I’m really hoping I won’t bump up against that while video editing or I may have to take drastic measures.

You’d think this stuff would be easier by now, even excusing my own ineptitude with hardware. I suppose it is for most everyone but Windows users.