I picked up an I/O Magic 320GB external drive on clearance at Target yesterday that I plan on hooking up to my Dell laptop to use mainly for storing my vast CD collection as MP3s so I can then copy them to USB flash drives to use with my car stereo.

Question 1
Regarding formatting and partitioning - laptop is WinXP SP3 - Is there any reason why I shouldn't just make one NTFS 320GB partition for this purpose?

Question 2
The Dell has only 3 USB 2.0 ports. I usually have the wireless mouse receiver in one, a USB light in another and a 4 port USB 2.0 hub in the third that I use to plug in flash drives, webcam and a wireless keypad only when I want to use them.

Is there any reason why I should not plug the external drive into the hub rather than directly into a port on the Dell while recording and transferring the MP3 files?

I don't think either really makes a big difference but I wanted to get some feedback from others who have more insight into using larger external USB hard drives.

Question 1
Regarding formatting and partitioning - laptop is WinXP SP3 - Is there any reason why I shouldn't just make one NTFS 320GB partition for this purpose?
The drive should already be formatted as one 320GB partition. It may or may not be NTFS, but that shouldn't matter to you. For file storage purposes (and having XP SP3) I see no reason to repartition the drive.

Question 2
The Dell has only 3 USB 2.0 ports......Is there any reason why I should not plug the external drive into the hub rather than directly into a port on the Dell while recording and transferring the MP3 files?
Nope, unless the system blue-screens. I've run into situations where connecting an external storage device to a USB hub caused the system to blue-screen, but it's been rare. As long as the hub is hi-speed it should be fine.

One thing to be aware of is sometimes external drives can have extra partitions, boot sectors &/or backup software. If you decide to re-partition and format the drive read through the documentation for any caveats so you don't accidently turn a few minute project into a few hour project

Thanks Alan!

The only documentation that came with the drive is a single slip of paper that says:
"Formatting Your Drive
Your new External Drive mat need to be partitioned and formatted.
Please follow the instructions below.
-Connect your drive to your PC
-Right click on My Computer and select Manage. Then select Disk Management. (Windows will recognize the device and open the initialization wizard. Follow the instructions to initialize your drive)
-Right click on your correct drive from the right hand side and select Add new partition. (From here you can select your partition size and also formatting options.)
-Once complete you can now use your new external drive.

Other than having the same thing in French on the reverse side, that's all that was in the box besides the power adapter, USB cable, drive and a stand.

(So I was really waiting to hear from you before I continued...)

Every external hard drive I've purchased came formatted. When you connect it to your PC do you see a partition?

I conected it and turned it on. Windows recognized that it was a USB Mass storage device and also a Hitachi hard drive and said it was configured and ready to use.

It does not show up as an additional drive in Windows explorer.

In device manager as a Hitachi HDT725032VLA360 USB Device, under it's properties it shows as a disk drive, location 0. Under the Volumes tab all entries are blank.

So I'm guessing it is not formatted or partitioned?

BTW under the Driver tab it lists a Microsoft driver version 5.1.2535.0 dated 7/1/2001

Well, it seems like it needs to be partitioned and formatted, hence the slip of paper with instructions

I am in the middle of setting it up. Do I want to give it a permanent drive letter?

And the partition wizard hasn't asked anything about the file system yet. Is it better to go with NTFS or is there a reason to go FAT32, or will it even ask me? (I haven't got that far yet, I'm still at assign a drive letter or path.)

Yes, give it a drive letter.
NTFS will be your only option when you go to format, unless the partition is 32GB or less.

Correct me if I'm wrong alan but I think fat32 is only necessary if you're planning to use the ext. HD on a mac?
(but I think there are ways for a mac to read a NTFS drive)

Also if you ever want to connect your ext. HD to your dvd player (to play divx/avi) via USB, your ext. HD would have to be FAT32.







Even though I've always read about the 32GB limitation, I don't think its true. All my ext. HD's are fat32 with partitions greater than 100GB.

Were they purchased that way or were they partitioned & formatted from within Windows? There are ways to partition & format drives greater than 32GB as FAT32, but not natively from within Windows XP disc management.

That's what happened, NTFS was the only option for initial format, and it took a while for it to format the 320GB drive.

While searching around last night I diid come across THIS from PCWorld that will format an external drive to FAT32. But I just went with NTFS. My main concern originally was that I read someone's opinion that NTFS causes the drive to search more and remain in operation more than a similar drive formatted in FAT32 and his contenetion was that if using the drive solely for music that you could end up with more track errors using NTFS. However I could not find anything else that backed this up, and Alan's advice has always turned out to be good enough for me

One option is to perform a quick format, but typically I use that option on drives I've used before. Although it takes a while I always like to perform a regular format on new drives because it checks for bad sectors (this is responsible for most of the time it takes to format).

This article describes the differences between a Quick format and a regular format.