Should I Reformat My 500 Gb Seagate Freeagent Go To Fat32 Or Should I Exchange For Wd My Passport?
Q. I want to export AVCHD videos from my camcorder to the external drive so I can watch the videos via PS3. PS3 only reads FAT32, Seagate is NTSF. Are there any problems with reformatting now or in the future?
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Reformatting your Freeagent to FAT32 will lose a little bit of HDD space and some features thats only available in NTFS. But if you are just storing files, it’s alright to do so. You have the added benefit of Mac support too.
However you cannot just format your 500GB from Windows XP/Vista as it can only format FAT32 for capacities < =32GB.
There is a way however, and it requires a command prompt. Press “Windows Key + R” together on your keyboard to invoke the RUN command. Type without quotes “CMD” & hit enter.
Assuming your 500GB is assigned drive letter F: , type without quotes “format /FS:FAT32 F:” & hit enter, Windows will go ahead and begin formatting the drive in FAT32!
Man…it has been awhile since I have used FAT32.
One school of thought tells you that you can not make a partition larger than 32GB using FAT32 in Windows XP using the format tool.http://support.microsoft.com/kb/184006/e…
There was a time, but I am not sure, that it stated that you can take that limitation up to something like 125-137.6GB, but the cluster size will be worse…like 64k per cluster, which will in the end, really eat up your hard drive space.http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlim…
This article states how to overcome the FAT32 limit, and an application to do so.
And another article that states you can with another application, although I am not sure to the validity of this site, due to the fact that it was posted in 2006.http://www.crapcontrol.com/content.php?a…
Hope this helps you in some sort of way.