Freecom FHD2-Pro

[Ruggerbugger]

Just got my FHD2-Pro portable drive from Scan this morning Checking the properties, I've noticed that it's formatted in FAT32 and showing 93.1GB (out of the 100GB advertised). Will I gain much from reformatting it as NTFS?

[scottyman]

not a lot as far as i can tell - with ntfs you tend to lose more space to the mft also I think

[herulach]

although you may benefit from a smaller cluster size depending what kind of stuff youre planning on storing on it. 93 gigs sounds about right, after youve gone real kilobytes to marketing ones.

[directhex]

although you may benefit from a smaller cluster size depending what kind of stuff youre planning on storing on it. 93 gigs sounds about right, after youve gone real kilobytes to marketing ones.

kibibytes!

now, for Ruggerbugger's benefit, i shall explain - don't be insulted.

computers work on base 2 maths (1s and 0s), not base 10 (0-9). as a result, the commonly used terms "kilobyte" and "megabyte" refer to 2^10 (1,024) bytes and 2^20 (1,048,576) bytes, where conventional metric maths says it should be 1,000 and 1,000,000 (as it is with kilometers, kilogrames, etc)

the base-2 numbers are referred to by the IEE as "kibibytes" and "mibibytes", since they're not true kilo (1,000) and mega (1,000,000) values.

hard disk capacities are measured in GIGAbytes. partition sizes are measured in GIBIbytes. so a 100GB drive is 100,000,000,000 bytes. 100,000,000,000 bytes is 97656250 kibibytes (KiB), or 95367.431640625 mibibytes (MiB)... or, as in your case, 93.132257462 gibibytes (GiB)

the space hasn't been lost to FAT32, it's been lost to the GB/GiB conversion factor

simple rule of thumb: a drive is 7.3741824% smaller than it claims to be

[herulach]

first time ive heard that expression, sounds a lot like cat food to me. Although i still prefer kilobytes and evil marketing speak as reference terms

[TiMeZeRo]

i hate how companys advetise stuff to sound better than it is liek flat screen monitors ... which are crts with flat screen :/ not flat panel ones :@

i might say to my ict teacher bout this one of them thinks you spell gigabyte and jigabyte ... wat a stupid woman

[Taz]

Slightly off topic, butI've just ordered the 80GB one of these from Scan. Are these actually any good in terms of portability, USB-power and performance? I plan on putting a lot of music and DVD's onto it for my travels as we're not really allowed to put personal data onto our work laptops.

[Ruggerbugger]

Mine is powered fine just from the bus on my laptop. In terms of portability, it fits into a shirt pocket, but it's about the size of an average PDA, so a suit pocket might be a better place. You'll have to find somewhere for the cable as well. I didn't necessarily go for portability as a priority (although it was important). I have 18GB of videos I use in my teaching, and it was a PITA to swop things onto my Gizmo drive (which is dying anyway). I'd like to see Freecom build a retractable cable into this, or supply an extra short version (10cm or so) that's a little more convenient to carry.

directhex, thanks for the info I was really trying to say will I gain much in terms of speed/efficiency from reformatting to NTFS. I know about the mibibytes thing, even if the definition escapes me sometimes

[Taz]

I got mine today from Scan. It's the 100GB one as well after I learnt that the 80GB weren't in stock. It's tiny and silent for a hard drive. It's also very fast (USB2 full speed interface).

It's a nice touch that Freecom supply a second USB power-only cable. You can also order a mains power supply free of charge from their site! However, i've tested the drive on two laptops and a PC and had no problems using the single bus-powered cable. Highly recommended.

[Ruggerbugger]

I've found the syncing folder irritating so far though. I've resorted to just dragging everything across manually. Can't really see myself using that feature much.

BTW, does anyone know if I could plug this into my network and access it over t'internet?

[Taz]

Rugger: I didn't bother installing any of the software that came with it. I just use it as a another drive and just drag and drop stuff. It gets recognised as just another hard drive when you plug it in.

I doubt you could use it over the Internet as it doesn't have an IP address. You would need some other other/software to allow it to be a mappable drive.

[directhex]

you'd need something like a linksys slug, which is a VERY basic ARM-based PC with a couple of USB ports and an NFS/SAMBA server: http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satel...VisitorWrapper

you can also install linux on the thing if you want to use it to serve other things, e.g. itunes music shares

[Ruggerbugger]

thanks, that looks worth considering.