LaCie USB Key MAX Formatting and Partitioning, What is Formatting?, What is Partitioning?

LaCie USB Key MAX	Formatting and Partitioning
User Manual	page 11

3. Formatting and Partitioning

Once you’ve connected your drive and it is recog- nized by your operating system (i.e. Windows or Mac OS X), you are ready to format and partition the drive. In order to store information on a hard drive, it must have a file system and be divided into sections that will contain the data you wish to store. This process is called formatting.

■What is Formatting?

When a disk is formatted, the following things oc- cur: the operating system erases all of the bookkeeping information on the disk, tests the disk to make sure that all of the sectors are reliable, marks bad sectors (i.e., those that are scratched) and creates internal ad- dress tables that it later uses to locate information. Your LaCie Hard Drive is preformatted in FAT-32 (MS- DOS) format. To reformat your drive, follow the in- structions in this section.

■What is Partitioning?

You can also divide the hard drive into sections, called partitions. A partition is a section of the hard drive’s storage capacity that is created to contain files and data. For instance, you could create three partitions on your drive: one partition for your office documents, one as a backup and one for your multimedia files. Or, if you will be sharing the drive with another person in your household or office, you can create a partition for each person who uses the drive. Partitioning is optional.

■File System Formats

There are three different file system format catego- ries: NTFS, FAT 32 (MS-DOS), and Mac OS Extend- ed (HFS+). See the table, right, for more information.

Technical note: The LaCie hard drive is preformatted in FAT-32 (MS-DOS) format, op- timized for use with Mac and Windows OS. See File System Formats, below for explanations of the other possible file formats.

Important Info: Reformatting will erase everything from the hard drive. If you have infor- mation that you want to protect or continue to use, back up this information before reformatting. If user manuals and utilities are deleted, you can download them from www.lacie.com.

Use NTFS if...

...you will be using the drive only with Windows 2000 or Windows XP (performance will generally be greater when compared to FAT 32). This file system is compatible in read only mode with Mac OS 10.3 and higher.

Use HFS+ if...

...you will be using the drive on Macs only; perfor- mance will generally be greater when compared to FAT 32. This file system is NOT compatible with Windows OS.

Use FAT 32 (MS-DOS) if...

...you will be using your drive with both Windows and Mac OS 9.x or 10.x or sharing the drive be- tween Windows 2000, XP, and 98 SE. Maximum single file size is 4GB.