Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: What Format to Use External Hard Drive?

This is topic What Format to Use External Hard Drive? in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mitchell Robinson (Member # 8693) on 06-12-2015, 11:25 AM:

What format to use external hard drive for dcp with a large file size its an external hard drive

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 06-12-2015, 12:11 PM:

MBR partition table (not GPT) and ext3 partition for the best possible chance that your DCP will ingest in any server out there. Also, put the DCP either in the top folder or only one level down.

Neither Windows nor MacOS will write ext3 natively. The easiest way to do one that I know of is to download an Ubuntu ISO image, boot it into a live session and then use the GPartEd utility to rewrite the MBR and then create and format an ext3 partition on your hard drive or stick. Ubuntu should then see the NTFS or HFS/HFS+ volume that is your computer's main hard drive and then let you copy the DCP from that onto your newly formatted removable media.

Many DCP servers will also read NTFS and some will also read HFS/HFS+ and exFAT. But many won't (especially if there are multiple and/or extended partitions on the drive), and so if you're sending a DCP drive to someone else to ingest into their server, providing a drive with an MBR partition table and a single, primary, Linux-formatted partition on it is the safest way to go.

Posted by Carsten Kurz (Member # 5396) on 06-13-2015, 06:50 AM:

Try to use a harddisc smaller than 2TB. It's not easy to (re)format a disc to MBR in modern operating systems. You need to follow special instructions to do it.

Here's the official doc:

http://isdcf.com/papers/ISDCF-Doc3-Filesystem-Structure.pdf

As a matter of fact, most servers today support NTFS. But that doesn't solve the MBR issue, and I would only use NTFS after making sure the server you intend to ingest it to is one of those supporting that format.

What operating system do you use to store/create the DCP?

- Carsten