USB Harddrives ( multi platforms )

[Michael_Lambert]

Hey guys,

Just looking to see what you are all doing if you have both PC and Mac.

I do not have the airport or anything like that and a couple of USB harddrives currently i have one for my mac and one for the PC, however i do work cross platforms often. But found i can not write to the drive that works on the PC i can read it on the mac but can not write.

The drive from the mac does not even read on the PC. So i am looking for a way i can have the one drive so both systems can read and write to it.

Thanks.

[crn3371]

Take your drive and plug it in to your mac. Open disk utility and format the drive as Fat 32. This way both machines will be able to read and write to the drive without any problem. The problem is that the pc drive is formated NTFS which the mac can read but can't write to. The windows machine doesn't even know what to do with the mac drive. The old Fat 32 system (which windows used to run) works just fine on both platforms, allowing you to read and write with ease.

[Michael_Lambert]

Right however is there not an issue with the file sizes using a Fat32 drive? I believe the file size limit is 4 gigs? Which i guess will be fine for using the drive for image storage only, however i do have a few images that are 10+ gigs in size :D

[tkbslc]

Right however is there not an issue with the file sizes using a Fat32 drive? I believe the file size limit is 4 gigs? Which i guess will be fine for using the drive for image storage only, however i do have a few images that are 10+ gigs in size :D

Yeah, FAT32 is limited to 4gb file sizes, but that is about your only option without some special proprietary driver and file system.

btw - WTF are you doing with 10GB images? How do you even open them? 75 shot panoramas in TIFF or something?

[Michael_Lambert]

Sorry, not image files... But shooting with the 5D2 i have HD video of some of my sessions i really wanted to keep with the stills from the same sessions. I guess i will need to keep a drive just for Still photography which i can share between both platforms and then a drive for my video work witch i only do on the mac anyways.

[tkbslc]

Is that video you have edited together? I thought that the Mk2 used Fat32 on the CF cards and had a 4GB file size limit as well. Just wondering.

You could split them into multi part .zip files if this is a backup disk. You would have to re-assemble them for use on a NTFS or Mac disk, though.

One other option would be to get a disk that can be shared via networking.

[Bobster]

you can format FAT32 to more than 4GB, i use a little utility called Swissknife - grab it from here (http://www.compuapps.com/download/swissknife/swissknife.htm)

[tommykjensen]

I have no experience with Mac's but my experience is that too often USB devices suddenly is not longer recogniced by windows so I have stopped using USB for mass storage and use NAS devices instead. Most if not all NAS devices should also be accecible from Macs over the network. At least I know that the Buffalo NAS devices I have can.

[René Damkot]

OSX can also be brought to write NTFS:Thread (http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?p=6938462#post6938462)

[Rodinal]

I do not have the airport or anything like that

Then just install it and you can share files and even hard drives.

You can find N routers for $20, and if you work with that kind of files I gather your Mac is quite recent, so it has AirPort built-in. You can find out if your Win machine has it too... if not, simply plug one of the machines using RJ-45 into the router.

You can share your PC external hard drive on your Mac. Therefore you avoid the need of re-formatting it and you'll be able to write on it from the Mac if it's plugged on the Win machine and shared over the router.


now,
if your machines are closeby, then perhaps the best thing to do would be gigabit ethernet between the two.
(I imagine gigabit ethernet is faster than N routers... someone please contradict me or confirm).

[Bobster]

ok, so i just tried a 40GB drive on a Mac after it was formated FAT and OS10 says no thanks..

[Tony-S]

Just initialize it as NTFS and install MacFuse and NTFS-3G on the Macs and you can then read and write to the volume(s).

[Michael_Lambert]

The new NTFS-3G actually has Macfuse with it. So there is no need to download both files anymore.