Final Cut Pro with External HDDs

[David Roth weiss]

[kilamunkyz] “Why is it important that I reformat the drives to Mac OS X extended rather than Journalled? My other 2 drives that work properly are formatted Mac OS X Journalled, could you tell me the difference?”

Dave,

In theory only the system drive is supposed to be journaled, not the media drives, because journaling creates a database that helps the computer to access the zillions of small files on that drive. Beacuse media drives typically have fewer and larger files, journaling in theory is not neccesary and theoretically slows down drive reads. In fact, computers are so fast now that this doesn’t seem to apply anymore. YOu will probably be just fine leaving your other two drives journaled.

DRW

[Dave Vickers]

OK thanks very much, I’m going to give it a go pretty soon.

[Paul Hartel]

Hey guys, quick, simple question I hope.

Will my Mac format an external hard drive so that I can use it to swap files between a Mac and a Windows PC? The FAT32 portables you can buy have a 4 gig file size limit, and, of course, I’m trying to carry quicktime video sequences between two different platforms so my files are much larger.

Is there a quick solution to this?

Thank you!!