- Posts: 5
- Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 1:03 am
The BMD Hyperdeck software Version 3.5 was released today, allowing the Shuttle and Studio units to read read not only HFS SSDs, but also exFAT formatted SSDs. A couple of thoughts. First, if you are connecting an SSD to your Windows 7 PC via an external dock (USB 3, Firewire 800 or eSATA), be forewarned that the drivers for these docks may preclude formatting your SSDs as anything but NTFS from the Windows 7 GUI. You can, however open a command window (formerly called a "DOS box") and type:
format z: /fs:exfat
where "z:" is the drive letter that you have assigned the SSD partition in the Windows disk utility.
This limitation is not universal to all brands of docks, but mine (a newertechnolgy VoyagerQ, which is a common dock) does it, so there are probably others. It may also be remedied by seeing if there is a driver/firmware/software update for your specific brand of dock.
The second item is that it is common for Windows 7 to not read exFAT SSDs that have been initially formatted on a Mac. In this case always format these SSDs on a Win 7 PC first, because Macs will always read those disks.
Lastly, formatting an large capacity SSD as exFAT is going to take a long time, especially for 512 GB SSDs.
format z: /fs:exfat
where "z:" is the drive letter that you have assigned the SSD partition in the Windows disk utility.
This limitation is not universal to all brands of docks, but mine (a newertechnolgy VoyagerQ, which is a common dock) does it, so there are probably others. It may also be remedied by seeing if there is a driver/firmware/software update for your specific brand of dock.
The second item is that it is common for Windows 7 to not read exFAT SSDs that have been initially formatted on a Mac. In this case always format these SSDs on a Win 7 PC first, because Macs will always read those disks.
Lastly, formatting an large capacity SSD as exFAT is going to take a long time, especially for 512 GB SSDs.