Fantom Drives G-Force Megadisk Quick Start Installation Manual - Formatting Your Gforce
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Formatting your GForce
Megadisk Hard Disk
The G-Force Megadisk comes preformatted with the FAT32
file system, which will mount on most modern operating
systems. FAT32 has some limitations, and we recommend
you reformat the volume to a file system format more
compatible with your particular computer and operating
system environment.
Formatting a hard drive erases all data contained on the
drive. Make sure to create a copy of the files you wish to
keep before reformatting.
Formatting the Drive in Mac OS X
1. Launch the Disk Utility application (located in /Applications/
Utilities folder.)
2. You should see the Megadisk volume listed in the left sub-
window. Click on the drive to highlight it. Information about
the Drive will appear in the Information sub-window.
3. Click on the Erase tab. In the Erase sub-window you will
see a Volume Format pop-up menu and a Name field.
4. In the Volume Format pop-up, select the format type
(MacOS Extended is recommended.)
Although it is possible to format a hard drive on Mac OS X
using the DOS file system, we do not recommend this, as
an artificial capacity limit may be imposed on the drive.
5. Click Erase. You should see an alert pop up with the
message: “Erasing a disk will destroy all information on all
of the volumes of the disk…” Click Erase. Once initializing
is complete, you should see the drive listed in the left sub-
window of the Disk Utility screen. Quit Disk Utility. You should
now see the Drive icon on the Desktop.
BIG (Span)
The BIG storage policy
concatenates the two
physical hard drives as
a single large volume,
resulting in a seamless
expansion. Hard drive A
and B are concatenated
into a single virtual volume
in the Figure below with
a storage capacity that is equal to the sum of each of the
physical hard drives A and B:
DUAL (JBOD)
The DUAL or JBOD (Just
a Bunch of Disks) storage
policy enables each hard
drive to be seen separately.
JBOD should only be used
with a port multiplier
enabled SATA host controller such as the MicroNet
SATAPCIX4 eSATA-PCIX host bus adapter, or the MicroNet
SATAPCIE2 eSATA-PCI Express host bus adapter. If used
with a non PM-aware eSATA host bus adapter, only a single
drive is presented (drive 0). No such limitation exists if
using a USB host connection.