did i format correctly?

hi!
i used HDDGuru Hard Disk Low Level Format Tool to format a 1TB external hard drive (took several hours). then i used EASEUS Partition Master 5.0.1 Home Edition to create a partition, assign a drive letter & make the drive FAT32 (so i can go back & forth between Mac & PC).

the EASEUS part was SO fast (like a few seconds) -- is that possible? everything seems to be working fine, but i wanted to check here before using the drive regularly to make my back-ups. FAT32 formatting which was so fast - is it generally stable??

many thanks!!

Go for it. The problem with FAT32 is that it stores chunks that are considerebly smaller than other formats on the disk , but it's only a question of sitting and waiting more for files to transfer. The other problems such as stability are ot an issue.

Because it works on both Mac and PC, FAT32 seems like a good choice and it is if you are primarily using the drive to move files back and forth.

However, there is one major problem: FAT32 has a filesize limit of 4gb, so it will not store any files over 4gb-- usually this just means that when copying a 4gb+ file to the drive it will cancel the operation after 4gb and not save anything.

If you do not ever plan to use 4gb files on the drive that is fine, but it is easy to (occasionally) reach that limit if you are using video, DVD disc images, or other large-format files. Music, images, etc., won't be an issue.

This is nothing about the overall limit, just per file-- you can store files that are in total 1TB on the drive, as long as no individual file is over 4gb.

One trick if you need to get around this is to use split archives, such as .zip, so that you have .zip.1, .zip.2, etc. (in whatever format your program names them), to split the file into smaller parts. This is not useful for files you use often, but fine for storage if necessary.


Aside from this specific issue (no files over 4gb), I have never noticed anything wrong with using FAT32.

Awesome!! You guys rock, thank you :)))