External Drive Question

[dadio2002]

I have Protools Le running on my mac powerbook and my pc also. I have a 250g Drive in my pc as the second drive which is NTFS. I wanted to buy a drive encloser to convert it into a external drive. I have heard that I cannot write data on mac with NTFS Do I need to format to fat32 to be able to use it between mac and pc so I can transfer my sessions back and forth if I need to?

dadio2002

 

[dops7107]

I have heard that I cannot write data on mac with NTFS Do I need to format to fat32 to be able to use it between mac and pc so I can transfer my sessions back and forth if I need to?

OS X will not read NTFS natively. FAT32 is readable by both Windows and OS X. I think - but I don't know for sure - that there is third party software that will allow OS X to read an NTFS volume. Anyone?

 

[mklos]

Yes, that is true. Mac OS X can read NTFS volumes, but not write to them. You will need to convert it from NTFS to FAT32 and then Mac OS X can read/write to it.

 

[dadio2002]

IS it true that even in fat32, mac can only read up to a certain drive size?

 

[rosalindavenue]

OS X will not read NTFS natively. FAT32 is readable by both Windows and OS X. I think - but I don't know for sure - that there is third party software that will allow OS X to read an NTFS volume. Anyone?

mklos is right; dops7107 was incorrect-- OSX can read an NFTS volume without software. I plugged my NFTS, XP formatted USB2 backupdrive into my ibook and transferred 15 gigs of itunes and 2 gigs of pictures with no trouble the other night. I'm not aware of any size limitation for OSX to read.

 

[robbieduncan]

IS it true that even in fat32, mac can only read up to a certain drive size?

I don't think so (well up to the max size the FAT-32 supports I suppose).

 

[jtown]

You're going to run into issues trying to create a big FAT32 partition. I had all kinds of trouble this weekend trying to get an old 120 gig drive going in a firewire box. Plugged it into my ibook (10.2.8) and created a big partition and formatted it. Worked fine on the Mac but my XP machines couldn't read it. (Yes, I chose the right filesystem.) Then I learned that XP won't create a FAT32 partition bigger than 32 gigs. The solution that finally worked was to use Partition Magic to create/format a big 120 gig partition on the drive then put it back in the firewire box. Now all my machines can see it.

MS claims that Windows ME will create/format a FAT32 partition up to a couple of terabytes but I wasn't really inclined to install it just for that purpose.

And, of course, once you get it working, you'll be limited to files of 2 gigs or less. The theoretical file size limit is 4 gigs but that only works in limited situations. (So don't plan to use the FAT32 drive for video editing.)