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Formatting a new 4TB Seagate drive
Ive just received the above and plan to use it mainly for my Windows based operating system. The drive appears to have been formatted already to NTFS. Should I start downloading items to it, does that I cannot then use it with my mac book air or iMac because of the NTFS format?
If the answer is no, what should I do to ensure I can use it on both operating systems? Is there any downside to it being formatted as Fat32? The drive also appears to have only 3.63TB free, does formatting it any other way enabled it to have more capacity?
If the answer is no, what should I do to ensure I can use it on both operating systems? Is there any downside to it being formatted as Fat32? The drive also appears to have only 3.63TB free, does formatting it any other way enabled it to have more capacity?
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From the way I understand this Question, it is an external disk, or he wouldn't have mentioned his MAC's. For that the PC's BIOS is not relevant
If only external, it might work and you make a good point. It still might be worth checking BIOS for updates on the Windows machine.
UEFI is only needed to boot from a gpt disk. As mentioned before it has to do with how disk manufacturers state their definition of TB,GB.. Computers use TiB/GiB
4TB = 3.63 TiB
4TB = 3.63 TiB
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"... You're just not old enough to remember the hubbub it created at the time. " ==> I wish :-) It's been like that since the early 60's when I was writing AutoCoder on an IBM 1401.
so it must have been the OS that changed the reporting
It may be that the early microcomputer OS's (CP/M, etc.) reported it differently before evolving to match their "big brothers" in the mini-computer and mainframe world. But in any event, computer science folks have always considered 1KB = 2^10, and disk drive makers have always advertised their disks counting 1K as 1000 bytes ... and I suspect that isn't going to change. So new folks are always going to be complaining about getting less than the advertised capacity for their drives :-)
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If you are going to use the disk in Windows, you need to make sure the BIOS will handle that size and that you are using GPT and not MBR for the disk setup. If you can change to UEFI BIOS it would be a good idea.