Is "Mac OSX extended" format ok for the PCH?

[Pilou]

(09-24-2008 09:13 AM)Christian123 Wrote:  @Pilou
Sorry, i have some further questions:
Do you have a internal HDD installed? (I hope an internal HDD is not the reason for giving write support)
The external media source you attached was a 3,5" USB-HDD?
How did you format the drive? Under Mac OS 10.5 with HFS+? Apple or GUID?
The ext. HDD showed up in the Finder (i guess under Network)? And you could simply transfer the files using the Finder via drag and drop?

Sorry if some questions sound stupid. But so far i am still waiting for my A110.

Thank you so far!

Yes under shared (litteral translation from french) in finder and the WD fat Tb green baby is indeed internal. Got only 2.5 external I can't touch but I know what it is to wait for the new toy : have tried a usb stick in journalized HFS (disk utility of 10.5.5, G4 MAC) still recognised in SMB (not in FTP) but I can't confirm write support yet (don't want to make false assumption anymore).

[Christian123]

Mon ami,

recorgnized is not the internal 1 TB WD but only the 2,5'' external drive? Makes it interesting why the USB Stick can't be accessed.

Greetings to my french (?) neighbour from Germany,
Christian

[Pilou]

My 2.5" is NTFS and I didn't try to connect it but I think the solution has been found on this post : http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=2222.

Will try the USB key HFS without journalisation to check if it solve write access issue.

Herzlichen Gruessen von Frankreich, Pilou.

[Christian123]

Just read the other thrad and asked also there a question. It seems that the apple partition tabe is needed to get read and/or write support with HFS+. Please let me (us) know if you resolve this one.

Greetings to France!

PS: your german seems to better than my french...

[narra]

Hey Christian. Sorry, for the late reply---I don't check these forums so often now.

Yeah, strangely, my HFS+ formatted drive worked well with the PCH. But I changed to ext3 because no one could tell me that HFS+ was officially supported. I didn't want to run into any bugs later.

As for the partition tables... I'm not sure. All I did was format through Disk Utility (on 10.4).

From what I've read, there is no ext3 driver for the mac yet. And I hear more than a few people are having problems with the ext2 driver.

If you don't need to connect directly to your mac, I say go to ext2/3 (ext3 I hear is supposed to be more reliable). If you want to stay with HFS+, try emailing Syabas and see if you can get a definite answer.

Good luck!

[Riot Nrrrdâ„¢]

I was able to format a 32 GB USB stick as HFS+ and play videos directly from it.

I think I was also able to copy the files to the internal HDD using the "FILE MODE" button on the eGreat remote (I have an EG-M31B, not a Popcorn Hour btw).

I have used the EXT2 driver for the Mac to transfer the files onto the USB stick. I tried using "tar" but quickly found that processes trying to talk to the EXT2 partition would hang at the end and never exit cleanly. To my surprise doing drag'n'drop in the Finder worked fine.

The real problem was the length of time it took to write the files to the USB stick. I think I wrote 2 ISO disc images of a 2-disc movie - total about 8.75 GB or so - and it took two hours to complete!

Combine that with it taking another 20-25 minutes or so to copy from the USB stick to the internal HDD and you have roughly 1 Mbyte/sec transfer rates using this EXT2/"SneakerNet" method of transferring files onto the internal HDD from the Mac. Contrast this with the 5.3 Mbytes/sec rates I'm getting using FTP over hard-wired CAT6 Ethernet that I strung from the back of the house (where the Mac is) to the front (where the eGreat is)!

So the real bottom line here is that if you want high-speed transfers from an external eSATA/USB 2.0 drive into the internal HDD of the Popcorn Hour or eGreat (or ... ), you will have better luck with a plain HFS+ (Case-Insensitive, no journal) volume than if you use the Mac EXT2 driver and write to the external disk as EXT2 before moving it to the PCH/eGreat/etc..

[Christian123]

Ok, thanks so far!