Moving from PC to Mac - Existing external data drives

[drandy1]

I am considering moving to an iMac from my Dell PC. I think I am comfortable regarding switching platforms for my Adobe programs (Photoshop and Lightroom) but my concerns/questions relate to my data storage. I currently have an NAS drive holding all my photos and music media. It is formatted as NTFS. I then have a separate 1Tb hard drive also formatted as NTFS which serves as a back up to the NAS drive. If I were to switch platforms I believe that I can only read from the NTFS drives. What would be the recommendations for enabling me to switch platforms while retaining reliable read/write access for my data? Or should I purchase a new EHD and format for Mac and then transfer the data? Then I could reformat my original two drives and share the data back again? Seems long winded? I may only have the Mac available to accomplish this task as my PC is not even booting up these days! A whole separate story.

Thanks for any advice from cross-platformers...

[MaxxuM]

Yes, OS X can only read from NTFS drives (with a patch). There are several options you can consider, but the main one would be to get a large external firewire drive to serve as a Time Machine. Number two, how much data are we talking about? If there is only 100 or so gigs you could just copy it to another drive, reformat the NAS to a format that is read/writeable by OS X (FreeNAS is a good place to start) and then copy all the stuff back, reconfirm it, then do the same with the backup drive. Also, some NAS setups allow for FTP/Samba setup which is Mac compatible.

I'm sure you'll really enjoy going Mac - it's very liberating :)

[drandy1]

Thanks. We are talking about 150GB in total right now. I will look into both the options that you suggest.

[ocabj]

You can read/write to NTFS volumes using MacFuse + 3G-NTFS:

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

The I/O isn't all that great though, at least, that's what I found with earlier versions. I haven't used 3G-NTFS for a couple years now. Perhaps I/O performance is better in the latest version.

[Moppie]

Yes, OS X can only read from NTFS drives (with a patch). There are several options you can consider, but the main one would be to get a large external firewire drive to serve as a Time Machine. Number two, how much data are we talking about? If there is only 100 or so gigs you could just copy it to another drive, reformat the NAS to a format that is read/writeable by OS X (FreeNAS is a good place to start) and then copy all the stuff back, reconfirm it, then do the same with the backup drive. Also, some NAS setups allow for FTP/Samba setup which is Mac compatible.

I'm sure you'll really enjoy going Mac - it's very liberating :)

You can read/write to NTFS volumes using MacFuse + 3G-NTFS:

http://www.ntfs-3g.org/

The I/O isn't all that great though, at least, that's what I found with earlier versions. I haven't used 3G-NTFS for a couple years now. Perhaps I/O performance is better in the latest version.



Will these solutions work with Snow Leopard?
Becuase anyone buying a new iMac now, will be getting Snow Leopard.

[ocabj]

MacFuse actually comes with SL. At least, it was in my System Preferences menu and I never installed it manually (clean install).

I don't know if ntfs-3g works in 10.6. It worked in 10.5. If it doesn't work in 10.6, they'll release a new version that works in 10.6.

[wlescall]

Apparently you can enable NTFS support in SL.

See here (http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=785376).

And Paragon has a beta NTFS For Mac that is supposed to be SL compatible.

[MaxxuM]

Will these solutions work with Snow Leopard?
Becuase anyone buying a new iMac now, will be getting Snow Leopard.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD so it's a no brainer that it would be fine with Mac's on the network. If you're really geeky you can find scripts on the web to run periodically to backup whatever you want to the NAS as well as automatically map NAS drives to your desktop. In the end, if whatever you find on the net supports UNIX network wise will also be able to support OS X (sometimes requiring you to use Terminal though).