HDD format of existing DVR drive, into second USB3 port

Hi, forgive me for the basic question but I'm trying to wrap my head around this, exploring options and thinking about a future migration. The instructions for "Secondary Pi OS drive" include this:

  1. Attach your existing DVR drive to the second USB3 port

My current 12 TB drive being used for Channels DVR on Mac is formatted "MacOS Extended" though. If I plan to move this drive to a Pi someday, should this external be formatted as ExFAT instead? Would that even work?

CleanShot 2021-04-24 at 10.20.59

HFS drive can be read but not written to. So you could attach it and serve up your old recordings as an additional storage location.

Exfat would provide better compatibility and write support.

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Ok great, so I will copy the files off this drive, format it as ExFAT, then copy the files back. That way it'll work on both the Mac for now, as well as on the Raspberry Pi when it's plugged in as drive 2 in the future. Is that right? Thanks for the reply.

Disclaimer: I am no disk format expert, but I have read of cross-platform issues with exFat when the subject drive is not formatted in Windows itself.

Here is one such link:
cannot read exfat drives created on mac os

Within the link above the claimed solution is this:

So if I was looking to format a drive exFat and move around between Windows, Linux, MacOS, I would format it with Windows (if available) and use a unit size of 1024 kilobytes and hope for the best.

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Another thing about the PI, from what I've read if you are using a bus powered external drive, the PI may not be able to provide enough power to reliably work the external drive and you may need a powered USB hub. If the external drive has it's own power source then you may be fine.

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Thanks, yes, this is a self-powered 12 TB drive. And thanks for the info about formatting with Windows and using the 1024 kb size. I'll do that!

Well, sorry to give different ideas - but based on this article and based on the size of your 12 TB drive, it might be better to try 128KB for the cluster size.

allocation-unit-size-exfat

image

Interesting! Thanks for the followup info.

Older Topic. But, a question: when adding a 2nd hard drive to the Raspberry Pi, where is that in the settings. I see under Samba there is /media/DVR. I've added a Thumbdrive to see what would happen. But how is this handled as far as "imports". Would I still created /media/imports/TV or Movies in the 2nd drive. Or, would it be handled under "Local Content" ?

I have a WD Purple 10TB I disconnected from my Tivo and would like to expand my storage. Incidentally, I thought I read Pi has trouble with Sabrent enclosures. Is this true for the external HD?

TIA