After many years on a pc, I have finally decided to go mac and ordered the mac pro tonight. After some some intensive research on these forums, I have decided to use the stock 320gb HD for WinXP+apps on bootcamp; a 500gb HD for OSX+apps and a 1tb HD for Data such as music, photos, videos and work such as Rhino, 3ds, CAD, PS, AI files, etc... However, I am wondering whether i will be able to read and write from and to the 1tb Data hard dive from mac and pc? Please forgive me if this sounds kookish, but i am new to this. Any advice is appreciated.
I am not an expert, but believe that the only format that both OSs can read from and write to is Fat32? Unfortunately, it's a slower format compared to NTFS, and does not allow files in excess of 4GB. Also, supposedly there is a limit on the size of such a partition (Windows enfoced) but you can google around for a little app that will work around that. If you are running Mac OS, you can read an NTFS Drive, but not write to it. I believe that Windows cannot read or write Mac formatted drives.
Anyone using MacDrive with Bootcamp? I have an old version (5) of MacDrive on my XP box that I use to hook up Mac Firewire HDs to the PC. Worked great for me and let me access content I created and stored on Mac drives directly from my PC, which was used for programming. Current version is 7, and they do advertise the benefits of their program for dual booting systems using bootcamp on the main product page. http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/ Check on these forums and google for people using this combo in practice ...
Thanks for the recommendation! I checked it out and the MacDrive 7 does appear to be everything i need. So to verify, if I formatted my 3 hard drives like this: 320gb NTFS drive - winXP 500gd HFS drive - OSX 1tb HFS drive - DATA Then by using MacDrive, I can transfer files from the NTFS drive to my HFS Data drive and vice versa...is this right? One last thing, can I transfer files over the network from pc to mac without a MacDrive?