Topic: Mac/PC External HD Compatability?

[ijwthstd]

My friend uses some sort of Mac and has been importing all his recordings to an external hard drive. The past few years he has been burning me DVD's with AIFF files which I then convert to wav with Sound Forge before editing.

He has been doing a lot more transfers recently.   

I just have a regular HP PC. If I have a hard drive sent directly to him will I be able to easily access the material? I am thinking of just grabbing one of the Western Digital Refurbished 320GB for $39.99 the next time they are on sale and have him fill it up with whatever.

[rastasean]

Yeah, getting the internal drive and an external enclosure is a good idea but he will need to format the drive to either FAT32 or NTFS so your system can read it. I would recommend the ntfs since this is the more modern file format on windows.

If he is no longer using the external drive that you speak of, maybe he can open it up and take out the HDD and replace it with the one you provide him.

The real issue here is the file systems and how the OS' will read/write to it.

[johnw]

Depends on how it is formatted. If it is formatted for NTFS he will have to install something like NTFS3G to be able write to an NTFS drive. If it is FAT32 and there aren't any files over 4GB then you should be fine. I doubt if it is formatted for Mac OS but if it is, he'll be able to write files to the drive but you won't be able to read from it.

EDIT: I would recommend against NTFS because even with NTFS3G installed the mac will be slow writing to it.

[DigiGal]

Alternately since there is an issue with 'MS-DOS File System'. It cannot write files over 4 GB. If you are working with files over 4 GB, you may need to purchase a program like MACDRIVE

MACDRIVE is installed on a Windows based computer and will allow you to read and write to a MAC formatted drive.

You can learn more about MACDRIVE here...
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

[Erick del Valle]

Alternately since there is an issue with 'MS-DOS File System'. It cannot write files over 4 GB. If you are working with files over 4 GB, you may need to purchase a program like MACDRIVE

MACDRIVE is installed on a Windows based computer and will allow you to read and write to a MAC formatted drive.

You can learn more about MACDRIVE here...
http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6/

YUP! MACDRIVE saved my life!

Saludos!