USB drive format - NTFS or FAT32?

Greatstuff

Greatstuff

New Member
While FAT32 works fine, the size of the files is limited. I have an 8Gb drive and it allows me to transfer programmes from the unit (whether SD or HD, the latter after being Foxy'd)

However, I have an NTFS-formatted USB drive (64Gb) and while I can transfer recordings to it, they just won't play on my PC. The length shows up as blank on Windows Explorer and it tells me it 'cannot render the file', so how can I make the unit allow workable copying to NTFS, please?
 
This is a bit of a mystery. What version Windows (Win10 has been observed to corrupt external drives)? Try reformatting it with Windows (not a quick format).

The best work-around I can offer, in the absence of more definite suggestions of cause and cure, is to use Ext3 format - see Things Every... (click) section 12.
 
I last tried it on Win7, but am now using Win10 so will give that a try (and hope it doesn't corrupt anything). Ext3 would make it too small if it's just 2Gb that it leaves you with.
 
Where did you get that from??!

Ext3 is capable of very large files and drives, and it's what the internal HDD is formatted to. It's also what we need to format an external drive as for recording on the diskless HD-FOX (we prefer Ext2 for a recordable Flash drive, but that's not something you have to worry about for just transporting recordings).
Black Hole said:
For transporting and archiving, the main consideration is format. There are four possibilities:
  • FAT32 - a FAT format drive can only cope with files up to 4GB in size. If you copy a recording larger than this onto the drive, the Humax will truncate the end and not tell you it has done so*. However, FAT has the advantage of being useable on almost anything.
  • NTFS - no problem with large files, but the HD/HDR-FOX can only read from it, not write to it*. (Note for HDR-1800/2000T owners: write support for NTFS is standard.)
  • Ext3/Ext2 - Again no problem with large files, and the Humax can format drives up to 2TB to Ext3 (for larger drives use Linux utilities on a PC). For UPDs it would be better to format Ext2 using Linux utilities. The problem here is Ext3/Ext2 is not directly compatible with Windows PCs (Linux is OK), unless you install a utility.
  • exFAT - Extended FAT, without the limitations of FAT32 and maximum compatibility between Windows and Mac, but not compatible with the HD/HDR-FOX*
Thus there is no clear winner and which is most convenient depends what you want to do. For simple jobs (particularly with the smaller files of StDef recordings) FAT is the easy solution - except most USB drives and larger UPDs are supplied formatted NTFS these days, and Windows will only format drives up to 32GB as FAT. For larger drives a utility is available... The best all-rounder is probably Ext3
Click to expand...

See the original post in Things Every... for the utility you need to install to provide Ext3 support in Windows.
 
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