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Hard drive question.

646 views 13 replies 7 participants last post by  Nodscene 
#1 ·
I'm sorry if I post this in the wrong area but couldn't figure out where to post it.

Hello all,

I'm kinda stuck in a rock and a mountain and need plenty of help.

I need to get my wedding video from the editor who is using a Mac and I have a Windows 8.1 laptop. I already gave him a hard drive that I had for about 5 years now but he said it not readable on Mac. I do not know if he format the HD to HFA+ before trying transferring any files. Is it true or bull that the drive wouldn't read on Mac?

I have been in the market for a new HD which will be network connected to store all my family home videos.
I need at least 1tb and half of that well be the wedding video. This new drive will be connected to Asus RT-N66U. Because it will connected at all time would you recommend getting a HDD or SSD?

I have been doing some research on different format for HD and I found the link below.
http://www.cnet.com/how-to/the-best-ways-to-format-an-external-drive-for-windows-and-mac/

Any suggestions out there for me?

What external hard drive would you recommend?

Please and thank you in advance.
Vic

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
 
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#2 ·
Hi, Since he's on a mac, he can read any FAT32, NTFS or HPFS. He just can't edit reliably directly from it. I use Tuxera NTFS to read and write NTFS but can't edit from it.

On the other end, I'm a straight kind of guy. So... I'll put my 2 cents here: He just don't want to touch your video, I wouldn't, from what I understand. Yet it remain to be seen :)

Regards,
 
#3 ·
Macs cannot write to an NTFS drive, but they can technically read them. Give him a FAT32-formatted drive like a 32GB thumb drive, and that'll work OK. Windows machines can't read Mac-formatted drives unless they use a 3rd-party program like MacDrive, but everybody can read FAT32 with no problem, assuming the file names are legal.

The little $50 portable USB2 drives out there are fine, again if you format them FAT32. Readable on both Macs and Windows machines. We do it all the time, every day. Newer Macs and newer Windows machines can read USB3, which is actually pretty usable in terms of speed.
 
#4 ·
Beware of the old 1998 fat32 4gb file limitation. MacDrive is also supplemented by paragon's plug-ins IMO.

He will read NTFS anyway and gave you back in the format he can as he need to transfer the data to use it anyway. No workflow is stable using it directly.

Btw, I won't trust my "kind of big data" :) on anything else then NTFS or HFS+ in that case.
 
#7 ·
Our wedding videographer also used mac. He gave us the hard drive with the raw footage, and we bough him a new hard drive. That was part of the negotiations before we hired him (we got edited DVD master with copyrights to produce multiple copies our selves, and raw footage)

To read it on PC I had to install a conversion utility, and then saved it on the network storage
 
#11 ·
"In the April 17 Windows Client UPDATE, I wrote about the 4GB file-size limit in FAT32. In response, I've received dozens of email messages telling me that FAT32 isn't limited to 4GB but rather that the 4GB limit is a FAT16 artifact. I also received messages questioning my assertion that NTFS is appropriate for small office/home office (SOHO) and small business users, but my point didn't center on NTFS's general appropriateness. I stand by my conclusion that if you're doing video editing on Windows, you need to use NTFS.

"I've run into the 4GB wall when creating files on FAT32 partitions. Because I realized that the problem might have been caused by the video-creation software I was using, I tried again with different software to create an AVI file larger than 4GB. No dice: As soon as the file size reached 4GB, the application failed."


http://windowsitpro.com/systems-management/understanding-file-size-limits-ntfs-and-fat
 
#13 ·
Is it true or bull that the drive wouldn't read on Mac?
It's likely true that it wouldn't work out of the box. It's not hard to get it to work

A general rule of thumb I've found for the majority of photographers I know personally is that they are quite illiterate with most of the underlying OS (take your pick) and only have workable knowledge of whichever particular editing software they use (usually without knowing where bottlenecks are created in their workloads, etc) though that is quite a tangent

There's a 4GB limit on single-file size for many, many operating systems
Not true for any up to date modern OS

Transfer over network
Possible idea. Wire both up to a switch on the same network, create a share somewhere on your 8.1 laptop for the video (can be external), and copy away. 400GB divided by average write speeds to an external is going to take a long time though. Just helping him format the external to read/write on his own would still be your best bet
 
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