External Hard Drive trouble transferring really large files

Oddler

Oddler

Member
I'm looking to transfer huge video files from my Laptops Hard Drive to my Buffalo External HDD. The problem is though that some of my videos are 5 Gigabytes and it will not transfer large files like that.

Is there any way around this on an external HDD? Are there HDDs I can buy that are better? I really need to store some of these uber large files. Any advice here?
 
The problem your having is that the Buffalo is formated in FAT32 which limits the size of any given file to 4GB. If you can reformat the Buffalo to NTFS you won't have any issues tranffering files over 4GB to the device.
 
lawson_jl said:
The problem your having is that the Buffalo is formated in FAT32 which limits the size of any given file to 4GB. If you can reformat the Buffalo to NTFS you won't have any issues tranffering files over 4GB to the device.
Click to expand...

That sounds useful. Do you know the ups and down sides to doing that...and where can I learn how to do this?
 
If your using the drive in a strickly Windows enviroment there isn't any downside. If your using it with an Apple or Linux system you may have some systems that can't read the drive. At this point I pretty sure all major Linux distros can read and write NTFS (Ubuntu can) and I'm not entirely sure what Apple can and cant' read. Natively I'm thinking Apple can't read NTFS but there are addons. Maybe some one more familar with Apple can chime in?
 
lawson_jl said:
If your using the drive in a strickly Windows enviroment there isn't any downside. If your using it with an Apple or Linux system you may have some systems that can't read the drive. At this point I pretty sure all major Linux distros can read and write NTFS (Ubuntu can) and I'm not entirely sure what Apple can and cant' read. Natively I'm thinking Apple can't read NTFS but there are addons. Maybe some one more familar with Apple can chime in?
Click to expand...

You lost me :3

I have Windows Vista 32b

I want to change it from FAT32 like you said to NTFS so I can transfer a few files that are over 4 Gigabytes....I dunno how to do that though. How would I go about doing that to transfer some huge files onto that external hard drive?
 
FAT32 and NTFS are both hard drive file systems. FAT32 was designed to be universal (usable by any type of computer) but it is also rather old and one of the disadvantages is that it cannot store files greater than 4GB. NTFS was designed by Microsoft and so is used primarily by Windows. For along time other operating systems could not use it, but now Mac can read it, and even write with certain mods, and apparently Linux can also.

As for what to do, you will need to create an NTFS partition on your drive. I assume right now it is just one partition, so firstly you will need to free up some space, then shrink the FAT32 partition, then create the new NTFS partition with that free space.

To do this, press the vista button, then search msconfig. Open it, then click on drive management, and you should see your drive. Then right click (make sure it's the correct drive) and select shrink volume however much you want to shrink it. After it's done, right click on the unallocated space and right click, then select create new partition, and be sure it is NTFS. Then you should be good to go.
 
Are you using this external drive to plug in to a DVD player with usb. I ask because most DVD players will only accept fat32.

There is an easy way to convert if you have space.
Copy your files from your external to another drive.
Go to my computor , Right click on your external drive and format. You will be given an option for ntfs.
Copy your files back on to your external.
 
I just realized I wrote the wrong instructions in my previous post. Instead of searching msconfig, you will want to right click on "Computer" or "My Computer" then go to manage. From there it is the same.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top