Just put down on a brand new MBP

hey, after a lotttttt of consideration, i have finally put my money down on a MBP, after about 5 months of research, where i intially needed a notebook asap.

i originally was one of the few who thought the power/form ratio of the MBP was unbeatable, and i believe it still is, but i am a windows guy and with bootcamp i thought what the hell i'll just use windows, but after careful consideration im going to switch, actually maybe a 50/50 spilt of the hdd. and i will definately be getting parallels or vmware fusion, and would like to see which one people recommend, regardless of price?

but my main question is how do my fellow bootcampers deal with their collection of movies and music? the problem is i require to access it from both OS's and originally thought that because OS X can read ntfs natively that i would put it all on my windows partition, but more recently i have thought i would like to be able to edit the movies/music as well, not so much as edit but write to because i will do my downloading in OS X.

Thank you in advance, you guys have really helped so far in making this decision.

 

You can do a few things. If 32GB of movies and a maximum file size of 4gb per file is enough then you can use a FAT32 partition to store the movies. They both OS X and Windows have access.

Also you could install MacFuse and NTFS 3g and then you can read and write to ntfs files. Its not the fastest but works. Or the other way around... Buy Macdrive and with that you can read and write to HFS+ hard disks (OS X).

Why do you need access to the movies in Windows? You want to edit it with windows and OS X programs?

 

i would just experiment with the two operating systems for a while and see which you like better for this and that, and then plan out the rest accordingly.

I would use NTFS partition for windows regardless of the size of the partition. Install macdrive for windows and macfuse +ntfs3g for os x. both os x and windows and can now read and write to either partition.

Personally I keep everything in OS X because whether you like it or not OS X is the primary operating system as far as your laptop is concerned. If you need to reformat your windows partition, you will need to do it through os x. Since I end up reformatting windows every so often, I find it better to keep long term stuff on the mac hard drive.

 

yeah i'd like to edit in both windows and OS X, if im doing some 3ds max work in windows i sometimes like to watch a movie whilst doing it or take a break from work every now and again. and definately going to need my music from this as well, can i run a playlist of those songs in windows media player if the music is on the OS X partition through macdrive?

is macdrive a lot better than macfuse because of the speed issue?

 

first, you need to use itunes in windows. it will just magically work because both mac itunes and win itunes organize their files the same way. just set your itunes folder in windows to the same directory as your mac partition.

second, macdrive is no better than macfuse. read closely:

install macdrive on WINDOWS to be able to read/write hfs+ (mac hd partition) from the WINDOWS operating system.

install macfuse +ntfs 3g on MAC OSX to be able to read/write ntfs (windows hd partition) from the MAC OSX operating system.

 

i mean from a speed point of view, i have heard macfuse is slow, wondering if macdrive suffers from the same speed problems?

 

It's slightly slower, but not a huge deal.