Quote:
Originally Posted by mkraft
Earlier in this thread, it was pointed out that 'partitioning' and 'formatting' are independent.
But since the choice of 'partition scheme' is directly linked to which platform the drive will be used on, what advantage does the ability to use different formatting on different partitions actually provide?
Thanks.
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The partitioning scheme is really only dictated by a platform if the device needs to be a boot device for that platform. Otherwise pretty much all systems support MBR and many modern systems support GPT.
Say you were interested in using a single drive to provide full-fidelity Windows and Mac storage (not bootable, just "native" storage). You could use MBR (or maybe even GPT, depending on the age of the Macs and PCs with which you would like to use the drive) with one or more HFS+ volumes and one or more NTFS volumes. The data on each volume would not be readily accessible to machines with "the other" OS, but it would provide full-fidelity storage for both OS types on a single drive.
The goal in such a setup is not sharing data between platforms, but that does not mean that it is a useless configuration. Consider a tech support firm that wants its personnel to be able to carry around a single portable disk that holds the company's normal set of tools for working on Macs (HFS+), PCs (NTFS and FAT32), and Linux systems (ext3).