Format a 1TB drive with FAT32?

can anyone help me im a complete newb (see my intro post) and have just bought a seagate 1tb ext usb hdd to back up my ps3s download content games movies photos etc (i have quite alot) and im a little concerned as to how to go about the whole process as ive read that you arent able to format the whole drive in 1 go, how do partitions work and what is their purpose, i know it needs to be formatted to fat32 and im not sure if this topic has already been touched on but all advice can only improve my understanding thanks all

not sure that FAT32 'is required' - - please verify that

Fat32 on a 1TB drive is a disaster as far as space utilization; massive wasted space will result.

Secondly, Windows will not format fat32 >32gb even though it is valid - - you need some other OS to do the work for you.

The 1TB drive should have come preformated; can you attach it directly to your system and verify the setup with the Disk Manager?

@jobeard
I'm not a gamer but from what i've always read (unless things changed recently) PS3 doesn't support NTFS (not unusual for gaming systems either)

@cas28
Use SwissKnife freeware tool

see http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic58839.html#post551607

fat32

thank you both for your advice

@jobeard i have heard thru a friend whos quite techy that he has seen playstation 3s with upto 3tb hdd altho he never stated wether they were internal or external hdd, so i presume its a viable option. as far as im aware fat 32 is required for ps3 compatibility. why/how will it waste massive space as im unaware of the reasons and functions of formatting.


@LookinAround ive tried to do as much research into this as poss and everywhere i go they say that NTFS is not compatible with ps3s. will swissknife be able to do the whole drive in 1 go or will it put in partitions, if it does put partitions in what are the purpose of them

thanks again to you both

I'll not argue that you NEED fat32. However, compaired to NTFS, fat32 will allocate a full cluster of sectors for every file even if it contains say 100 bytes.
The number of Clusters are fixed in fat32 by HDSIZE/Max cluster count.
So the larger the media capacity, the larger the clusters get.

If you NEED fat32, then there's nothing you can do about it :wave:

I've used SwissKnife before but not for 1TB FAT32. However, if you look at the link i gave you

So SwissKnife is the simplest method and should do the whole 1TB in one partition, if that's what you want