Bargain Acer External Hdds Going At Carrefour/Big C

[aussiebebe]

You've got to chuckle at how dumb some people are....I'm self-professed tech-phobic and only recently discovered the art of downloading movies - about a decade after the rest of the world...so with only an 160GB hard drive on my laptop I congratulated myself last month on finding an Acer 1TB External HDD at Carrefour/Big C - a brand-new 2010-made (instead of '11) model for 1,799baht. I didn't know anything about 3.5" ones needing a power adaptor, bit of a surprise for know-nothing-me, and I started filling it up.

After a while I started going for the Bluray rips 8GB+ and couldn't transfer them off to the Acer "the file is too large for the destination file system" - it said. Hmmm. Even I'm fairly sure that 1TB is larger than 8GB. Better late than never, I found online the reason is that the Acer is FAT32 formatted instead of NTFS and won't allow anything over 4GB. Great, I didn't previously know any of this, but I can reformat, except while I do this, I've nowhere to store the bulk of the 300GB+ already on my HDD...... I'll put this down as a lesson learnt.....

[CMSteve]

This may be a lot of work, but you can partition the external drive into two drives. One holding the files that you've added and one made up of the remaining space. the one with the remaining space should be formatted as NTFS. then you can copy all the file from the first partition to the second partition. then you can delete the first partition and enlarge the second to take up the space of the full hard drive. This will take a long long time to complete, but if you are really keen on keeping those movies.....

Honestly, its probably a lot faster/easier to just format the whole drive and get the movies again.

[endure]

You can use convert.exe to convert a FAT partition to NTFS. Go to a coomand prompt Start/Run/CMD/ENTER

In the black box type "convert drive_letter: /FS:NTFS" and hit return.

I.E. if your external drive is e: then "convert e: /FS:NTFS" You don't need the quote marks when you're actually typing the command.

See here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb456984.aspx

[JamieP]

FAT 32 is very dated. When FAT 32 first came out 8GB files were hardly conceived of. But, FAT 32 is compatible with most OSs. If ACER sold the drives formatted to NTFS the Macheads would get all upset. So, rather than produce a separate line of what is physically exactly the same, FAT 32 makes sense for now.

In a few years, once 8GB+ file sizes become common - who knows?

[MrsMills]

Buy another drive, reformat it, transfer your 300 Movies to the new drive, reformat your existing drive and hey presto, two drives 2 x NTFS drives and one has 300 movies on board.

You'll need another drive for sure in the future, how will you back up your files without one, and you should back up your movies etc, nothing worse than having 1000 Movies on a hard drive that completely dies and you have no back up.

If you get into downloading you'll soon fill up a 1TB drive.

[Darrel]

Just use Partition Magic.

[aussiebebe]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I ended up taking 'MrsMills' advice and I bought another drive this afternoon. I got it at the Big C on Srinakarin which used to be Carrefour, must be old stock clearance; 1,779b for 1TB Acer.

At least I know a bit about formatting now, when I was looking around the net for answers I found 'geekwithlaptop' which reported last year (2010) that 'hard disc drives are formatted into 512 byte size blocks and have been that way for years but as from the first quarter of next year (2011) hard drive suppliers will start shipping hard drives with 4 K disc sizes'. I'm not even going to pretend to understand what that means but I'm guessing it's a good thing for anyone who's interested and might explain the low price ACERs I picked up.

Thanks again for the helpful replies.

[Darrel]

'hard disc drives are formatted into 512 byte size blocks and have been that way for years but as from the first quarter of next year (2011) hard drive suppliers will start shipping hard drives with 4 K disc sizes'. I'm not even going to pretend to understand what that means but I'm guessing it's a good thing for anyone who's interested and might explain the low price ACERs I picked up.

All this means is that the block size as supplied will be 8 times the size it was. The total size doesnt change.

Imagine a shop selling large boxes labelled "1000 biscuits", in which there are many smaller bags which contain the actual biscuits. It doesnt really matter what size the small bags are: 100x10 or 200x5 you still have the same number of biscuits and you can always change the number of biscuits in each small bag anyway, if you want. This is reformatting.

[endure]

If you'd have followed my suggestion which is a standard Microsoft routine you'd have saved yourself 1800bt.

[JSixpack]

If you'd have followed my suggestion which is a standard Microsoft routine you'd have saved yourself 1800bt.

+1. That was spot on.

[lopburi3]

As said converting FAT 32 to NTFS is a simple command line process.

The drives are good value (I have 4 or 5 of them at higher prices) but suspect the reason (other than normal lower price of electronics over time) is that USB3 is starting to become available. These are USB2 models. Not much difference if just for storage or movie playback or on most computers today but a big difference making system backups and such (if your computer is USB3).

[elektrified]

If you'd have followed my suggestion which is a standard Microsoft routine you'd have saved yourself 1800bt.

+1. That was spot on.

+2

[astral]

BTW I have a 1Tb 2.5" drive from Seagate.

No external power needed, so much more convenient.

[lopburi3]

As long as you have the power to spare and can afford the higher price. For home use the 3.5" is fine. For pocketing and travel then the 2.5" makes sense (but if using on another computer be sure it can get enough USB power).