New Mac Pro User and Old Storage from Win8 Questions

[ggmonogram]

Hi,

Just finally migrated to Mac from using Customized PC for years.

Fact that is I had 2 HDDs ( 2TB NTFS, and 500GB NTFS storage with tons of personal data) that I want to reuse as a storage, since I have 512GB Flash on my nMP only.

I would like to know what I can do to simply just plug in this two NTFS drives and continue to use it as an external without formatting it.

Options that I know so far but not sure whether or not I have to format are: NAS, and External RAID.

Can anybody clarify the concept on how to deal with this transition?

 

[ggmonogram]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817576009

Forgot to put, is this just what I needed? I expect when I slide in my existing drives, mac will just recognize as 4 different external drives plugged in and start working like usual. Isn't it?

 

[ZnU]

OS X's support for NTFS is read-only, so unless you buy some third-party software, just attaching these drives directly isn't really going to work. I think I'd be tempted to just buy a 3 TB USB 3 drive, format it for the Mac, copy the contents of your other drives to it, and use those other drives for backup or some other purpose.

You can get a 3 TB USB 3 drive pretty cheap. $105; barely more than that enclosure you're looking at, cheaper than any decent NAS option. Why overcomplicate things?

 

[ggmonogram]

OS X's support for NTFS is read-only, so unless you buy some third-party software, just attaching these drives directly isn't really going to work. I think I'd be tempted to just buy a 3 TB USB 3 drive, format it for the Mac, copy the contents of your other drives to it, and use those other drives for backup or some other purpose.

You can get a 3 TB USB 3 drive pretty cheap. $105; barely more than that enclosure you're looking at, cheaper than any decent NAS option. Why overcomplicate things?

with your suggestion i might still need a third drive to temporary move my files over, i guess, my strategy can be, buying one 4TB with the Enclosure, formatted in HFS+ or whatever supported by Mac, then slide in both NTFS and move all stuffs to my 4TB, and then format both. isn't this the only solution?

 

[ZnU]

with your suggestion i might still need a third drive to temporary move my files over, i guess, my strategy can be, buying one 4TB with the Enclosure, formatted in HFS+ or whatever supported by Mac, then slide in both NTFS and move all stuffs to my 4TB, and then format both. isn't this the only solution?

Buy a cheap USB 3 drive dock. I have one of these; works great, and it's a useful item to have around anyway as you can just use inexpensive internal hard drives as sort of a very high-capacity form of removable media.

Alternatively, you could just leave the old drives in your PC, use Windows file sharing to share the files over the network, connect from the Mac (where you'd have the new drive hooked up) and copy that way. It'll probably be a bit slower, but it should work fine. (I'd use wired ethernet for this, not WiFi).