If your new hard drive is FireWire and you intend to use it with both Macs and PCs, then leave it as is and do not reformat.

whether you intend to partition your hard drive or not, you really should reformat your new hard drive for the Mac. Capturing clips longer than 9 minutes could result in the captured clip being broken into separate files. 2 gigs is good for about 9 minutes of DV capture. Using the drive for FCP (and encoded files for DVD SP) could cause problems. It is possible that your new cross platform hard drive could have a 2 gig file size limit. This is true, but because the drive is formatted for cross platform compatibility, some stability and facility issues could arise. When you purchase a new hard drive for your Mac, either SATA/ATA (internal) or FireWire (external) the box that the drive comes in will likely tell you that the drive will run on both Macs and PCs. With FireWire external hard drives reaching one Terabyte in size, partitioning the drive can make project and file management much more manageable. I typically partition into two volumes, one for FCP Captured media, the second for DVD SP projects, for Builds and MPEG 2 encoded files. Partitioning can be used for organization purposes, i.e., each volume could be used as a media (scratch) drive, each for a different FCP Project. With hard drives getting bigger there are reasons why you might want to partition a hard drive. You can create up to 16 different partitions on a hard drive, each one can be of different size and format, even including the 'MS-DOS' format for use with PCs on a network.

Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a hard drive into separate, discrete sections, called 'volumes'. Formatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS Xįormatting & Partitioning a Hard Drive in OS X - Tiger and Leopard

Partition external hard drive mac