One-time data copy from old Windows to new Mac?

[Kaitlyn2004]

I have an internal hard drive in my Windows desktop.

I now have a MacBook Pro, along with a 14TB USB3 drive. I expect to format that as APFS (unless I hear differently?!)

Looking to move across the Windows internal drive contents in its entirety, which is 99% RAW photo files.

Thinking I'll expose it as a temporary network shared drive, then access it from my laptop with the external drive plugged in? Contents is about 4TB. Given the sheer volume of files along with average filesize of like ~30MB, should I literally just copy+paste or it feels like I should probably use a different method or tool to get the data from the older drive while ensuring integrity of it (checksums?)

Not entirely sure what I'll be doing with the old drive inside the Windows desktop, but I'm not planning to keep it in sync or anything afterwards.

 

[Bigwaff]

Thinking I'll expose it as a temporary network shared drive, then access it from my laptop with the external drive plugged in?

Certainly doable. Copy speed and time will be determined by WiFi router and PC WiFi card. You have WiFi 5 / 6 router? Best experience would be to connect both PC and MBP to router via wired ethernet, either directly or using switch.

 

[genexx]

I have APFS for Windows so i could just plugin the Mac APFS formatted 14TB USB drive and copy from Windows.

Or you could buy an usb sata adapter (for 3,5 inch Sized HD you need one with AC Plug) and connect the internal Windows drive via usb.

That they are bigger files make it easier but still it can be very slow to transfer many files over Network.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"I now have a MacBook Pro, along with a 14TB USB3 drive. I expect to format that as APFS (unless I hear differently?!)"

You are "hearing differently" from me.

DON'T format a platter-based hard drive to APFS.
APFS is really intended for solid-state drives and won't improve the performance of a platter-based drive. Quite the contrary, you will probably see increased fragmentation and get some "drive thrashing" as well.

A platter-based drive that is used "for data only" should be formatted to HFS+.
In disk utility, that's:
"Mac OS extended, journaling enabled, GUID partition format"

Also, don't use "case sensitive". Case INsensitive is better.

The ONLY time a platter-based drive should be APFS is when absoutely required, such as a boot drive (but I don't think the latest Mac OS's will even boot from a platter-based drive any more), or, if the drive is used for backup with a backup app that requires it (such as time machine).

 

[genexx]

As i would never ever use a Rotating HD as Startup/Boot drive and my WD 20TB USB has no Problems as well as Writing with 215MB/sec and Seek and Read is fast as well..... I stay with APFS on it for my File Based Backups.
If you have Millions of little WebFiles the Situation is different, but if you do not zip em you have fun anyway

An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives - Bombich Software

bombich.com

The rest of this article is fairly technical, here are the key takeaways:

• Enumerating an APFS filesystem on a traditional HDD (rotational disk) will take 3-20X longer than HFS+ on the same hardware.
• This performance difference is most noticeable on a macOS startup disk that is (or includes) a rotational disk.
• If Apple doesn't make some concessions in the APFS filesystem to accommodate the slower seek performance of HDD devices, then a rotational device will never be able to provide acceptable performance as a production macOS startup disk.

Does this mean I should avoid using APFS on my HDDs?​

No, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. APFS has loads of really nice features, like snapshots and volume space sharing. Managing volumes within an APFS container is a dream compared to the older method of preallocating space to specific partitions. It's important to understand why we might expect to see performance differences between the two filesystems and when that might impact your use of the filesystem, but this one performance aspect on its own isn't enough reason to avoid it.

 

[Kaitlyn2004]

Okay so I ended up taking the internal drive out, and hooking both up as externals to my MBP. But I can't copy it across anymore, Finder gives me a unexpected error -50 and rsync gives me

rsync: readdir("/Volumes/Storage/Downloads/."): Invalid argument (22)
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at

Some quick googling points this to potentially being ownership of the files issues - that owner doesn't exist on the MBP? Maybe?

But I don't know how to fix it... I know NTFS on MacOS is read-only by default, but that would SEEM to be completely fine for the purposes of copying the data off the drive...

 

[Kaitlyn2004]

No worky

sh-3.2# rsync --archive --compress --human-readable /Volumes/Storage/Downloads/ /Volumes/MBPStorage/Downloads
rsync: readdir("/Volumes/Storage/Downloads/."): Invalid argument (22)
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /AppleInternal/Library/BuildRoots/c4b332c0-77a5-11ef-9847-daac7d5d70b1/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/rsync/rsync/main.c(996) [sender=2.6.9]

It was fully working when the NTFS drive was still connected to the PC, but I was getting ~100MB/S... which is going to take a WHILE to transfer 4-5TB

(But maybe faster than debugging this!!!)