Technical Information
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LaCie d2 USB Hard Drive
NTFS
This acronym stands for New Technology Filing System, and it is the native file system for Windows NT, Windows 2000 and
XP. NTFS offers several features that are not available with FAT 32; i.e. file compression, encryption, permissions, and
auditing, as well as the ability to mirror drives and RAID 5 configurations. The minimum supported volume size for NTFS is
10MB, with a maximum of 2TB, with no limit to file size. Volumes created in NTFS can only be directly accessed (not through
shares) by Windows NT, Windows 2000 and XP, without resorting to help from third-party products.
Guidelines for Choosing FAT 32 or NTFS
Use FAT 32 if:
• You will be dual booting with an Operating System other than Windows NT or Windows 2000.
• You want to access the stored volumes on any Operating System other than Windows NT, Windows 2000 or XP.
• You may need the ability to dual boot down the line. Once you have converted a volume from NTFS to FAT 32, there is no
going back. You can convert from FAT 32 to NTFS, but not the other way around.
Use NTFS if:
• You want to encrypt files, assign permissions to files, or want to audit files for access.
• You will be formatting partitions larger than 32GB.
• You need to store individual files that are larger than 4GB.
• You need a filing system that can be mirrored or structured like a RAID 5 configuration.
5.3 Mac OS Standard vs. Mac OS Extended
There are basically two file systems for the Mac OS: Mac OS Standard (HFS) and Mac OS Extended (HFS+).
Mac OS Standard
Mac OS Standard refers to the file system used by Mac OS 8.0 and earlier. This was the original Hierarchical File System
employed by Apple, and was used before computers really began to see dramatic increases in hard disk drive sizes. In HFS,
the disk is divided into a maximum of 65,536 equal-sized blocks, with these blocks being the destination point of data stored
by the Mac.
Initially, these spaces were small, due to the lack of size in hard drives (i.e. hard drives smaller than 1GB), but as hard drive
space increased, the file system became inefficient. With HFS, even the smallest file on any disk has to occupy at least one
block. For example, if you had a 4GB hard drive and divided it by 65,536, that would equal roughly 64K, and that would
be the smallest block size under HFS. So, if you had a file that was only 4K, it would still have to occupy 64K.
Mac OS Extended
Mac OS Extended refers to the file system used by Mac OS 8.1 and later. HFS+ represents an optimization of the older HFS
file system by using hard disk space more efficiently. As hard disk capacity increased over the years, Apple realized that they
