I've long used the capability of the Mac OS to read
PC-formatted removable drives (Jaz & Zip Disks, floppies
years ago), but I had never had the need to mount a PC-formatted hard
drive until just last week, when I tried to download a multi-GB data
set from a colleague's PC-formatted Maxtor drive. We couldn't get the
darned thing to mount on my PowerBook, and I had to settle for a
partial data transfer to a Dell laptop with a nearly maxed out drive.
I concluded from this experience -- erroneously, apparently -- that
hard drives were, in some way, different beasts that couldn't be
recognized by the Mac OS.
When one of you responded directly to me that you transferred
data between Macs & PCs, regularly and without a hitch, using a
Maxtor HD, I looked into it a bit further and discovered what I think
was the problem. Maxtor makes a OneTouch line of products the does
auto backups (or file synchronization?) at the press of a button on
the front of the drive. These drives comes in PC-only, Mac-only and
dual-platform versions, determined not by the drive formatting, but by
the back-up/synchronization software. My colleague's drive was
apparently one of the PC-only drives, but he didn't alert me to this
functionality. He's a PC-only kinda guy.
So, the consensus seems to be that I should just buy a
PC-formatted drive and dispense with MacDrive. The vendor I'd prefer
to use only seems to sell Mac-formatted drives, but I assume I can
reformat the drive to FAT32 using a Windows machine.
Is there anything special I need to know about the PC
formatting?
I'm still interested in the Firewire 800/400/USB 2.0/PC CardBus
questions, although one respondent said that despite the specs on
paper, the high-to-low transfer speed sequence on a Mac is
FW800>FW400>USB2, rather than FW800>USB2>FW400.
As for the buffer RAM size, it is only likely to be important
under certain conditions:
At 4:05 PM -0500 09/27/04, Jay A. Kreibich wrote:
> 5) Do 8MB hard drive buffers provide
significantly improved
> performance over 2MB buffers? I assume so....
For a great number of small files, yes. For reading large
multi-gig
files straight front-to-back, no. Basically it is a
question of if
the cache is used or
not.
Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond.
Jeff
--
----------------------------------------
Jeff Kennedy
Vegetation Ecologist/Biogeographer
Information Center for the Environment
Dept. of Environmental Science & Policy
University of California, Davis, CA 95616
Home Office:510-658-7645
Campus Office:530-752-1768
Mobile:510-708-9655
E-mail:email@hidden
Internet:http://ice.ucdavis.edu
----------------------------------------
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