External Drives

[John8520]

I came across two external drives today, first is a USB2 CD-RW from goodwill for $6. Normally they have no computer stuff, but I found it in the bottom of a bin with the original cables. It's really speedy and seems to read and write discs with no problem, and the case is rubberized. The other drive I got is a USB floppy drive, which is something I've been after for ages but not for the going price ($30). This one belonged to a friend of my mother who ended up never using it. According to the paper it works with pretty much everything, OSX, OS8.6+, windows, linux, etc. Finally I have a good way to make floppies for old computers without digging out an old clunker.

 

[Bunsen]

Nice. Just FYI, you won't be able to make 800k or 400k Mac floppies on that USB drive.

 

[Dennis Nedry]

Also formatting floppies in OS X is a bit hit-and-miss. It won't do the part where it goes back and eliminates bad blocks. You also don't get the 100% same full capacity for some reason. Also, as soon as you browse a floppy in the OS X finder, a considerable amount of the disk is used up by OS X hidden files. This is why it's best to write-protect any disks you mount in OS X.

I would definitely recommend formatting all of your disks on an old Mac, or using pre-Mac-formatted disks. It is possible to avoid some hidden files by NOT opening the disk in the Finder. Using terminal to do everything works nicely for this. Also, terminal can show you hidden files using "ls -a" so you can delete them and get the space back.

Of course, if you're just putting a few files on the disk that don't take up much space, the hidden files may not matter to you.

All I'm trying to say is that OS X has some problems with floppies that you should be aware of.

 

[Christopher]

Also formatting floppies in OS X is a bit hit-and-miss. It won't do the part where it goes back and eliminates bad blocks. You also don't get the 100% same full capacity for some reason. Also, as soon as you browse a floppy in the OS X finder, a considerable amount of the disk is used up by OS X hidden files. This is why it's best to write-protect any disks you mount in OS X.
I would definitely recommend formatting all of your disks on an old Mac, or using pre-Mac-formatted disks. It is possible to avoid some hidden files by NOT opening the disk in the Finder. Using terminal to do everything works nicely for this. Also, terminal can show you hidden files using "ls -a" so you can delete them and get the space back.

Of course, if you're just putting a few files on the disk that don't take up much space, the hidden files may not matter to you.

All I'm trying to say is that OS X has some problems with floppies that you should be aware of.

And make sure Spotlight is turned off for that floppy as that takes up space as well.

 

[John8520]

I'm not really concerned, I won't be using OSX with it much at all. Thanks for the info though, kind of a shame to think OSX makes so many invisible files.