I use a ton of FAT32 drives to archive because they are much less expensive and I do xfer files larger than 4gb all the time. you can't simply drag files into a FAT32 drive, but you can use ditto -av command in terminal to get around it.

First of all, magnetic drives themselves don't have a specific filesystem.

A FAT32 drive can be reformatted to NTFS, EXT3/4, XFS, or whatever hell else you want.

A pre-formatted Seagate with NTFS isn't anymore expensive than a Seagate pre-formatted with FAT32.

If you're talking about solid state stuff like USB thumb drives, you shouldn't be formatting them FAT32, you should be formatting them EXFAT, if you're using them with Windows, because it's far more efficient at keeping the drive alive.

Finally, FAT32 cannot store files larger than 4GiB. It is mathematically impossible.

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GiB minus 1 byte or 4,294,967,295 (232 − 1) bytes. This limit is a consequence of the file length entry in the directory table and would also affect huge FAT16 partitions with a sufficient sector size.[1] Video applications, DVD images, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Al...on_Table#FAT32

dude, this a mac/unix thread. you're talking windows/dos.

FAT stands for "File Allocation Table".

That table is an index that exists in the filesystem itself, regardless of whether you mount it in Windows, Unix, OS X, or anywhere else. All operating systems use FAT32 in exactly the same way. Pointers to files and folders are stored in clusters and those clusters are indexed in the file allocation table.

The file and directory length entries in the index have a limited size and therefore the index cannot accommodate files larger than 4GiB.

You cannot write files larger than 4GiB to a FAT32 filesystem on Windows, OSX, Linux, or any other operating system. It's a limitation of the filesystem itself.

Here's a thread from a person who swore their Lacie external HDD, formatted FAT32, could store a 30GB virtual machine image.

The problem is that a VM image is not a "file", it's actually a folder or bundle.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=477728

hmm, well, I recall figuring a way through terminal to get larger files copied to drive without reformatting. I have somebody else doing this now, but I'll look for my notes on it.

Well, you did say you were "archiving" or doing backups, right?

It's entirely possible that your archive looks like a file but is actually a bundle of files in a wrapper. I'm guessing that's the case. Similar to the guy on that Mac rumors post.

At any rate, it doesn't really matter. I'm not trying to bust your chops or anything. Just making sure the information is out there.

You shouldn't be using FAT32, it's gross. :D

Can't you use a time machine backup and restore?

You can but there are things to consider. I backup to NAS for everything. The way time machine works the preset size limit of the sparse bundle is equal to the size of the volume. So Time Machine will eventually fill up whatever drive you put it on. Not a big deal for a single purpose drive but absolutely sucks if you use a NAS, have multiple user directories on the drive, or use the drive to store media or other files.

There's a ton of tweaks you can do but in the end I opted for a FireWire 800 enclosure and a 200GB drive. Trying to backup directly to NAS and limit the size of the sparsebundle was just too problematic. It got over 400GB at one point. Now I run Time Machine on the local FireWire drive and then make an image of the entire disk once a month and copy it to NAS.