usch;482337 Wrote: > Still, I put the blame on the drive manufacturers in the first place if > they sell NTFS preformatted drives not clearly labelled as "Not > compatible with anything except Microsoft Windows".
Who are these drives being sold to? Pretty much exclusively Windows and Mac OS users. Plug the drive into a Mac machine and it can easily be formatted by the customer. Anyone running Linux would know to do the same thing even if they had to compile a kernel to do it. ;) Selling NTFS formatted drives is a complete non-issue in terms of compatibility or customer confusion. > So the only reasons to use NTFS on an external drive are if you > absolutely need to work with files bigger than 4GB How about the fact you can't format in any other format with Windows XP? No one outside the geeks who download third-party formatting utils are formatting external drives in anything but NTFS - and haven't been for years. > > In the end manufacturers are giving up universal compatibility only to > save a minority of users a few mouse clicks. If people find that their > external disk does not work with the Touch because of that, they should > send back the drive, not the player. I think you have this backwards. The minority of users are the only ones who would even know what FAT32 is. Everyone else has been using NTFS for 8 years or longer. No drive manufacturer is going to cater to the minority of users. That's why you don't see everyone selling SCSI disks. Seeing as NTFS has been the standard on the desktop for at least 8 years (XP+) I think it's safe to say that if your device doesn't work with it, it's the device that's to blame. And that's exactly how every single customer is going to see it. That disk has worked everywhere else until today when I plugged it into my Touch. Period. > I just dont see it as mandatory. I think it's mandatory. In fact, mandatory in the first product release. You don't want to make a negative impact on this type of product launch. Seeing as the Christmas buying period has already been blown (the Touch will not be out until some time in December) now is the perfect opportunity to delay it as necessary to make sure important issue like this are taken care of. The world at large won't notice the delay because they don't even know about the Touch yet. Once it's marketed and hits display shelves, they will very much notice it doesn't support their disks. -- MelonMonkey Bruno *'Twisted Melon - Fine Mac OS Software' (http://twistedmelon.com)* ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MelonMonkey's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8466 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=70142 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
