FAT 32 & PORTABLE STORAGE DEVICES.

Question

HI
i'm looking to buy a portable storage device (psd) for my
digital camera - one where i can slot in the memory card &
save my photos on it while im away.
Amazingly, there are problems with these devices not being able
to be formatted on macs "because they use FAT 32.."
Could any one give me some advice about this subject.
What i want to do is a regular anti fradmentation routine of formatting
the psd every so often - All these types of product use FAT 32.
What do i do...?
d

Answer 1

First, to comment on the Disk Utility formatting as "DOS", when I take the drive I formatted on the Mac as DOS and hook it up to Windows XP, XP identifies it as FAT32. As I said before, I use a 40GB drive and format the entire volume as "DOS" and it works fine as a OTG device. And when I hook it up to an XP machine, it sees the whole volume as well. However if you try and format it with XP, because it is above 32BG, you are not offered a choice of "FAT" or "FAT32" as a format to use, only NTFS. Microsoft designed their operating system to only format drives as FAT32 if the drive is under 32GB, however it, XP, will happily use a >32GB FAT32 volume if already formatted that way.
I have looked at many of those other products you point to back when I was looking for something for this purpose. First and foremore, I use an Olympus camera that uses XD-Picture cards. Most of those devices that have built in card readers either do not support XD-Picture cards at all, or I couldn't get confirmation that the ones that can could read the newer 1Gig XD cards (many card readers won't).
But in addition, I found many of those solutions to be very expensive, most costing several hundreds of dollars. They do have the advantage of having some sort of display, so they should be able to give you some feedback if the transfer was successful before you delete your photos from your card. Mine is simply a drive that will take any information off any USB device plugged into it, but doesn't really give you any way to check your photos transferred correctly. There is a light that will blink red or something if there is some sort of transfer error, but that is about it. So you have to kind of go on faith your transfer worked, if you don't have a computer you can plug the drive into and check (which you probably don't or you wouldn't really need this sort of device). But I have found mine to work fine and haven't experienced any problems yet.
The Macally is a much cheaper solution since the enclosure is about $50 or so. Then you throw your own drive in. If you have one laying around already (say from a past laptp drive upgrade) your are ready to go. I bought a refurbed drive for about the same price so my total cost was roughly $100 for 40GB of portable OTG storage. You can probably find cheap smaller laptop drives to make your out of pocket price a lot less.
One nice thing I like about this one is that is has a USB connector for the OTG feature instead of a card slot. So I can plug ANY USB mass storage device into it and the drive will read all the data in from that device. So you can plug a digital camera in directly, a card reader, a USB Thumb drive, another hard drive, etc.
There are other OTG drives and drive enclosures out there. Here is a cheap one...
http://www.pcmicrostore.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=c:36232;p:10502274
But I have no experience with it so can not tell you anything about it.
Patrick