Please forgive my ignorance in not quite understanding what you mean. Probably this is due to my quite not knowing how you format those HDDs that you can you use with a camera, which are not exactly simple HDDs but small computers indeed.

In my head they came formatted and you just connected them to your camera and computer. Several functions could be done when interfacing with your PC, but for that there should be some kind of OS in the HDD to take care of that. But paying so much money and not getting a disk with the OS for your drive?

Maybe this is what you are talking about. Is that so?

You are quite right. A device like the Sony HR60 or the Firestore are indeed computers with hard drives connected to them. They are obviously not like a desktop computer but they are certainly computers.

You are also correct that a hard drive has a PHYSICAL format. This is done by the manufacturer when the drive is made. Separate from the physical format is the file system (FAT, NTFS). It is the responsibility of the computer that is going to work with that drive to maintain the file system portion of the hard drives format.

The part of the hard drive that the computers operating system interacts with (the file system) has rules and very specific methods of interaction. In the case of NTFS knowing what those rules are is what MS wants you to pay for when you decide to develop your small computer to interact with a hard drive formatted with NTFS.

Chris

Well, it seems I found just one more reason for not using HDDs! ;)

Long live tape!...