Drive Formats (Storage Only, Not for Recording to)

[AudioOIART]

A question to all you pros :

I have a 160GB SATA Hard Drive, that will be going inside a SATA/USB external enclosure and given the task of holding all my backup sessions, sample libraries, and other related media.

What is the most logical / most effective choice for the Drives format?

-HFS Extended (Journaled)
-HFS Extended
-HFS Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled)
-FAT 32
-NTFS
-Something Else I am Forgetting (Like MS-DOS)

What would make the best sense for going from computer to computer. It has to work seamlessly with Mac's, PC's, and any other computers that I stumble accross.

Thanks in Advance,
Scott in T.Dot

[Roy Pahlman]

My vote goes to FAT32 to allow the drive to be read by a MAC or PC

[weezerboy]

fat 32 is the only format ive found that can be both read from and written to, on both pc and mac. i would make sure there are no partitions over 125 gigs though, ive heard that sometimes mac doesnt like fat 32 drives larger than that. although you will be able to read and write to a fat 32 drive on both mac and pc, pro tools DOES NOT have the ability to playback and record audio from a fat 32 drive used on a mac system. you would have to drag the files from the fat 32 drive to the internal (or other mac os formatted drive) to playback or record to the drive. thats as close as ive been able to get to complete cross compatibility. i think all of that made sense.

[EGS]

There are limitations to the FAT32 format. I've been getting great results using HFS+, not journaled. On Win XP, get Macdrive software, a Digi-recommended app. This is working great for storage on both platforms. http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/