Do I need to format FAT32 an extenal hard drive before I use it on a Satellite receiv

Goreme

Someone I know has a Triax satellite receiver. I am going to get for them an external hard drive so they can (finally!) pause live TV and record programmes etc. My question is, can the external hard drive be used straight out of the box, or does it need to be FAT 32 formatted before it is used with the Satellite receiver?

I am getting a Maxtor 1 TB  USB powered external hard drive.

Johnboy1951

Goreme wrote: »

Someone I know has a Triax satellite receiver. I am going to get for them an external hard drive so they can (finally!) pause live TV and record programmes etc. My question is, can the external hard drive be used straight out of the box, or does it need to be FAT 32 formatted before it is used with the Satellite receiver?

I am getting a Maxtor 1 TB  USB powered external hard drive.

The specification of the receiver model should state what formats are acceptable to it.

wonski

Just connect it and see what happens. Very likely that the receiver will just delete all the data and format the disk itself. That's what mine does.

Goreme

wonski wrote: »

Just connect it and see what happens. Very likely that the receiver will just delete all the data and format the disk itself. That's what mine does.

Thanks, but this will be a new external hard drive. Have now googled it and they come preformatted with NTFS anyway. I was just thinking if it needed to be formatted to FAT32 which it doesn't, as FAT32 is an older format which was superceded by NTFS. What got me thinking about this was that my work Macbook Pro will not write to a new memory stick or my other NTFS external hard drive. The only way I could get my work Macbook Pro to write to a memory stick was to format the memory stick as FAT 32 first.

wonski

Goreme wrote: »

Thanks, but this will be a new external hard drive. Have now googled it and they come preformatted with NTFS anyway. I was just thinking if it needed to be formatted to FAT32 which it doesn't, as FAT32 is an older format which was superceded by NTFS. What got me thinking about this was that my work Macbook Pro will not write to a new memory stick or my other NTFS external hard drive. The only way I could get my work Macbook Pro to write to a memory stick was to format the memory stick as FAT 32 first.

As Johnboy said the manual will tell you what it should be formatted to, but most of the time just connecting it will tell you if it works or not

If it doesn't work straight out of the box then you can check the manual.

Reading your post again are you buying this as a gift and want it to work straight away on the day?

Goreme

wonski wrote: »

Goreme wrote: »

Thanks, but this will be a new external hard drive. Have now googled it and they come preformatted with NTFS anyway. I was just thinking if it needed to be formatted to FAT32 which it doesn't, as FAT32 is an older format which was superceded by NTFS. What got me thinking about this was that my work Macbook Pro will not write to a new memory stick or my other NTFS external hard drive. The only way I could get my work Macbook Pro to write to a memory stick was to format the memory stick as FAT 32 first.

As Johnboy said the manual will tell you what it should be formatted to, but most of the time just connecting it will tell you if it works or not

If it doesn't work straight out of the box then you can check the manual.

Reading your post again are you buying this as a gift and want it to work straight away on the day?

Nah, the Sat receiver isn't new. And its working with a 16GB memory stick at the moment, but that's got limited storage. One TB drive for E60 should solve all future storage. Thanks for the info.

FAT 32 isn't great for recording as file size is limited to 4GB ext3 or ext4 are your best bet. The box should be able to format it by itself though you wont be able to read the drive with windows or mac only Linux if you do need to use it for anything else which I'd assume you don't if designating it for recordings.

Johnboy1951

Blakely Future Seabed wrote: »

FAT 32 isn't great for recording as file size is limited to 4GB ext3 or ext4 are your best bet. The box should be able to format it by itself though you wont be able to read the drive with windows or mac only Linux if you do need to use it for anything else which I'd assume you don't if designating it for recordings.

There used to be third-party drivers for Windows to allow reading ext filesystems .... do they still exist?

The high horse brigade

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

There used to be third-party drivers for Windows to allow reading ext filesystems .... do they still exist?

Just share the drive and windows will be able to access it over the network, never need to plug directly into it

STB.

The high horse brigade wrote: »

Just share the drive and windows will be able to access it over the network, never need to plug directly into it

I'm guessing this is a TSC114 he's got. I doubt you can get into the drive mounts remotely.

Johnboy1951

Johnboy1951 wrote: »

There used to be third-party drivers for Windows to allow reading ext filesystems .... do they still exist?

I use Mac mostly so not sure about windows drivers, if I need to access the drive I just use FileZilla or ssh and if I ever need direct access I can just connect it one of my Raspberry Pis as they have no problem reading ext file systems.