i have a western digital 160 gig usb 2.0 7200rpm running on windows xp and it does not let me drag and drop huge files to it. i try and drag 4 gig video files into it and it says " cannot copy there isn't enough disk space try running disk clean up ".

is there a setting in xp where i can manage large file transfers from drive to drive?

will i get what i'm looking for in a firewire external drive?

i also tried to partition it into an NTFS drive but after i completed all of the steps in partition magic, rebooted my machine it gave me an error, and remained a FAT32 drive.

You need to format the drive with NTFS. FAT32 doesn't support files over 2GB - that's why you can't drag the files over.

Use Windows XP to convert it to NTFS.

Open the:
- Control Panel
-- Administrative Tools
--- Computer Management

Click on Disk Management, it should be under the Storage section

Right-click the drive and Format as an NTFS drive

what should i put for allocation unit size? it gives me choices from 64k up to 8192.

i do need to enable file and folder compression right?

Use the defaults settings when formatting. For most purposes though, any setting will work.

I wouldn't recommend using file and folder compression - it will make your hard disk and CPU work overtime.

i'm happy i waited, i was going to select the compression box. thanks a million.

I doubt Windows would squeeze much compression out of DV files.