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egold

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 26, 2010
3
0
Evening everyone,

My daughter has a mac air using lion. I just bought a 1tb 2.5" HD with an external enclosure. I want to transfer our home movies and family pic's from my windows 7 machine to this hard drive. My understanding is if I formatted the HD NTFS the mac can read the drive but not write to it. I bought a larger HD so she could transfer her data from her mac to this HD for safe keeping. Once she has the HD she will only be using it with her mac not a pc. Also I do not own a mac.

Question , Is there anyway I can get our data onto this HD and she also be able to write to it with her mac? Perhaps trying to format the HD with a mac file system? If that could be done using my pc would I be able to transfer my data to the HD? Fat 32 is not an option as most of the movies are greater then 4gigs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help
 

dma550

macrumors 6502
Sep 3, 2009
267
4
CT
yeah, this is a conundrum, I reformatted my new drive 3 times. I would recommend formatting it fat32, then it could be written to from the PC. Of course this is null and void if any of your files are larger than 4gb.

You can get an NTFS driver for the mac, but I didn't want to clutter my mac with potentially buggy drivers.

In the end, I made a 500gb Fat32 partition that I use for read/write, and use the larger for one way transfers of the few files that are > 4gb. I hope this helps!
 

egold

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 26, 2010
3
0
Thanks for the reply,

This all seems like a big hassle. So at the cost of the users of both os's were stuck. In this day and age compatibility between os's is so important and yet the 2 biggest makers of computers cant put there differences behind them and make both there operating systems read and write through usb.

I think I'll take out the data drive from my pc stick in a external enclosure I have laying around take both to a friend who does own a mac and just have him format the new drive and transfer the data for me. Total waist of my friends time but hey I'll owe him one.

Thanks again for the reply
 

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
Thanks for the reply,

This all seems like a big hassle. So at the cost of the users of both os's were stuck. In this day and age compatibility between os's is so important and yet the 2 biggest makers of computers cant put there differences behind them and make both there operating systems read and write through usb.

I think I'll take out the data drive from my pc stick in a external enclosure I have laying around take both to a friend who does own a mac and just have him format the new drive and transfer the data for me. Total waist of my friends time but hey I'll owe him one.

Thanks again for the reply
Post No. 2 is FUD. MacOS X works just fine with a third-party NTFS driver. I use Tuxera's freeware NTFS-3G driver with all of my Macs under MacOS X 10.4.11 to OS X 10.8.2. NTFS-3G requires a user patch in order to operate under OS X 10.8. Once patched, it just works. The commercial drivers Paragon NTFS for Mac® OS X 10 and Tuxera NTFS for Mac 2012 just work under OS X 10.8. The word buggy is wholly out of place. These drivers work as well as any other software on your computer and better than much of it.
 

GGJstudios

macrumors Westmere
May 16, 2008
44,541
942
Question , Is there anyway I can get our data onto this HD and she also be able to write to it with her mac? Perhaps trying to format the HD with a mac file system? If that could be done using my pc would I be able to transfer my data to the HD? Fat 32 is not an option as most of the movies are greater then 4gigs.
Format A Hard Drive Using Disk Utility (which is in your /Applications/Utilities folder)

Choose the appropriate format:

HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Don't use case-sensitive)

NTFS (Windows NT File System)
  • Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
  • Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
    [*]To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X, here are some alternatives:
    • For Mac OS X 10.4 or later (32 or 64-bit), install Paragon ($19.95) (Best Choice for Lion and Mountain Lion)
    • For Mac OS X 10.5 and later, including Lion, FUSE for OS X
    • For 32-bit Mac OS X, install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free) (does not work in 64-bit mode)
    • Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx $36), which is an enhanced version of NTFS-3G with faster performance.
    • Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard and later versions, but is not advisable, due to instability.
  • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS
  • Maximum file size: 16 TB
  • Maximum volume size: 256TB
  • You can use this format if you routinely share a drive with multiple Windows systems.

exFAT (FAT64)
  • Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
  • Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
  • exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
  • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support exFAT
  • Maximum file size: 16 EiB
  • Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB
  • You can use this format if it is supported by all computers with which you intend to share the drive. See "disadvantages" for details.

FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
  • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
    [*]Maximum file size: 4GB.
  • Maximum volume size: 2TB
  • You can use this format if you share the drive between Mac OS X and Windows computers and have no files larger than 4GB.
 

Tesselator

macrumors 601
Jan 9, 2008
4,601
6
Japan
Nice post!

I would be a little careful with FUSE tho. Put it through some paces on a empty test volume before you commit an data to it or give it anything important to deal with. My experiences with it on Lion was way buggy!
 
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