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how to fatten up a large drive

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr on December 16, 2009 at 21:35:01:
This info may be of use to those who would like to connect large external drives to their Blu-ray players or Media players via USB.

Some of the new Blu-ray players and Media Center-types (a la the PS3 and oppo players) have USB ports which allow them to play content from an external hard drive. Many users have upgraded to 500GB, 1TB or larger external drives and attached them to their computers to accomodate their growing collection of "stuff". However, one of the problems that one can run into when moving that massive external drive from the computer to the player/media center is that NTFS fomat drives are not recognized: the drives must be FAT32 to be seen. Simple solution -- just use the Windows format utility to format the drive to FAT32, right? Well, no. Many of the programs and operating systems will not format drives from NTFS --> FAT32 or will only format small drives (32GB or less).

Below is a link to a site which details this problem (How to format a blank >32GB drive to FAT32) and a solution (Acronis True Image to the rescue -- their software is kickass!). Format any hard drive up to 2TB in the FAT32 format in no time. Just remember that individual file sizes in the FAT32 format are limited to 4GB, which means some video may be restrained -- you may have to break it up into more than one part, but players like the PS3 have a type of "Play All" or "Sequential" feature to help with this. Most audio files should be fine (a CD converted to .wav is usually less than 600MB = .6GB).