Making an External Drive MAC friendly

[firman]

OR getting your MAC to do what Windows XP should be able to ...

I think this might be useful to switchers, especially those who begin to really appreciate the Aqua interface and all things OSX.

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We have recently switched to MAC OSX (using a 2ghz Macbook) for film editing and I am sick of Windows shortcomings and flakey behaviour.

The problem was we had an 80gb Freecom external drive, pre-formatted as NTFS (of course). We are increasingly using our Macbooks, but need to share JPG files, MS Office docs etc with a clients PC systems (and our own too). The external drive is essential for when we are onsite at the clients office (all Windows PC's).

The problem we had with the existing configuration of the Freecom USB 2.0 drive was that we could only update it from Windows XP. We could only read it from our MACS.

Anyway, here is a log of what happened over a period of a week.

Clearly the ext HD needed reformatting to FAT32 (as MAC's can write to this file system). So I tried reformatting the 80gb freecom via Windows to FAT32. Firstly this wasnt possible in the usual control panel utility as NTFS was the only option here. The help said it must be done via the command line (i.e. DOS). However, this failed on the disk size (FAT32 limited to 32gb). Great. I could have used a partitioning tool (not supplied with Windows XP) to make it into 3 virtual drives but that would have made using the disk cumbersome.

I contacted Freecom support who sent me a link to a very laborious procedure (not theirs - it was an unverified site), involving around 7 or 8 steps using 2 different (downloadable) EXE files to allow the disk to be formatted as FAT32 (once again via DOS). I am quite experienced with Windows but I wasnt happy with attemping this for many reasons, but mainly I thought it must be easier than this.

So I looked at the MAC disk utility, erased the disk, then formatted to MS-DOS and lo and behold I have a FAT32 disk of 80gb. This took about 5 minutes, with no downloads of potentially suspect programs.

We now have a very useful 80gb external drive that happily accepts read & write access from our MAC's and PC's.

WARNING - make sure your move all your data to another location before using this procedure as the ERASE via the MAC disk utility does exactly that.

For me, this has highlighted that Apple helps users do what we want and Microsoft forces users to do what they want.

Cheers
Eric

Remember - its okay to right click

[eric2006]

FYI - FAT32 is the best way to partition a hard drive you need to share, but you shouldn't use it if you need the best performance you can get. The maximum file size on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB, and FAT32 volumes quickly become fragmented, which is especially bad if you need fast data access, such as for video editing.

[firman]

Cheers Eric. My Seagate 400gb drive with firewire is on the way and I look forward to reformatting it from NTFS to Mac.

Do you have a recommendation as to which option in disk utility I should select? I understand HFS+ is the best format, but a friend has recommended partitioning the disk and applying RAID striping. Is this worth doing with virtual drives? The drive will be purely for video editing with Final Cut Express HD.

Cheers
Eric

[The Doctor]

Sorry, I have to say this. What is a MAC?

[Ifrit]

Originally Posted by firman

Cheers Eric. My Seagate 400gb drive with firewire is on the way and I look forward to reformatting it from NTFS to Mac.

Do you have a recommendation as to which option in disk utility I should select? I understand HFS+ is the best format, but a friend has recommended partitioning the disk and applying RAID striping. Is this worth doing with virtual drives? The drive will be purely for video editing with Final Cut Express HD.

Cheers
Eric

I don't see how a software raid across two partitions would improve the performance at all. (the amount of write/read action would still be the same because there is no additional HW used)

Even on HW site Raid0 still doubles the risk of data loss, because if one HD goes belly up then the whole data is lost. Raid0 HW configuration are preferable only for temporary storage of data.

OR getting your MAC to do what Windows XP should be able to ...

Then you aren't doing it the right way. Windows offers the data/storage management utility which lets you repartition the drive and allows to format the new partition with the FAT32 flavour.

[Satcomer]

With my setup and family home movies I came to the 4G files limit in FAT32. Then a friend pointed out that in my home world I was going about the problem from the Mac side when I should be going from the Windows side. So what I did was reformat the external to Mac OS Extended so OS x would have no problem reading/writing to it. I then ram the program Mac Drive on the Windows machine. now either machine can read/write & format in Mac OS Extended. Windows can even now save/read/write in OS X Style long file name format on the external as if it was just another drive.

[Timotheos]

Originally Posted by Satcomer

With my setup and family home movies I came to the 4G files limit in FAT32. Then a friend pointed out that in my home world I was going about the problem from the Mac side when I should be going from the Windows side. So what I did was reformat the external to Mac OS Extended so OS x would have no problem reading/writing to it. I then ram the program Mac Drive on the Windows machine. now either machine can read/write & format in Mac OS Extended. Windows can even now save/read/write in OS X Style long file name format on the external as if it was just another drive.

What about if you have clients etc. that dont have Mac Drive?

[Satcomer]

Originally Posted by Timotheos

What about if you have clients etc. that dont have Mac Drive?

The you want to be on the bleeding edge, NTFS-3G. Take this warning!!! This is not for the faint at heart! Plus backup and put on a test bed first to see if it works properly.