Synthology Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 Greetings, I have a 500GB external drive that is currently in NTFS for XP. I tried some of the apps for writing to NTFS in 10.5.2, however, its still a little unstable. My question is, what format is best so that Leopard and windows can read and write to the same external 500GB without problems. FAT32 will not work because it does not handle 4GB+ files well, if at all. Is there anything better than FAT32 and NTFS that works equally well in Windows as it does on Leopard? Please advise, your help would be most appreciated. Cheers, Prof. Synthology Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mebster Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 I have my shared partitions formatted as HFS+. These are the partitions where I keep my work, personal stuff, music, movies,.... OS X can directly access the partition (obviously). To allow XP to access it I use MacDrive installed in XP which shows up in My Computer as a drive. I even have my iTunes in OS X and XP looking at the same destination in my Downloads partition so that I use the same music from both. What it does mean though with iTunes is if I want an up to date collection, then I need to "Add to Library|" in OS X and Windows. But I just do this once a week or so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveWasTaken Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 i have a 320gb external, partitioned into 1 200gb fat32, and 1 120gb HFS+ for time machine. I then use the Fat32 Partition to store data from both. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lostgame Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 I use HFS+ as well on my 500 GB external, with pirated MacDrive (I can't provide a link but it's easy to find). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
U.C. Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 I use HFSExplorer. Find it much better than MacDrive. I hate that POS. Plus Paragon NTFS For Mac works perfect for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synthology Posted March 28, 2008 Author Share Posted March 28, 2008 Paragon worked ok for a little while. I had problems with torrents completing successfully from Azureus. Also, copying large numbers of small files would result in slight errors. HFSExplorer I have not tried. Will definitely look into that. I heard mixed reviews on MacDrive 6-7. Seems I better steer clear of that one. Thanks for the input. If there's anything else better, I'm listening. Prof. synthology Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aprodigy Posted March 28, 2008 Share Posted March 28, 2008 haven't had too many trouble with macfuse and move quite a bunch of data around (linux and osX(86) ntfs)... but i guess everyones mileage might vary with ntfs-3g... well, i guess you've tried that already anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rob356 Posted March 29, 2008 Share Posted March 29, 2008 I just plug mine into one of the computers, and share it using FreeNAS, running in a VM. Works flawlessly, no extra software for either(except for the VM). Supports every protocol under the sun, FTP, Samba, AFP, etc. etc. Free NAS uses almost no memory, and it is configured from a web browser, no GUI in the os itself. Very easy to set up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrblissbeats Posted April 20, 2008 Share Posted April 20, 2008 I recently went through the same issue and right now I'm moving all my files and samples from a 750GB HFS+ partition to a 750GB NTFS partition. I'm moving back to Windows for the moment as far as audio and music goes. I still love Leopard but it isn't doing it for me on that front right now. I tried all the Macfuse and NTFS-3G stuff .... even tried paragon. Right now its just not reliable enough for me. It's a big negative that Leopard can't natively right to NTFS drives and Macdrive doesn't work for Vista x64 (and I didn't buy 8GB of ram to run XP). So back to Vista x64 and Sonar I suppose for the moment. cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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