More MBP <-> windows questions....

Sorry to keep pestering you folks but I seem to keep thinking of new questions. I've searched through the threads but can't seem to find a definitive answer.

Here's the scenerio: Base PC running Vista & MBP laptop. Several external laptop drives (both USB only and USB/Firewire combined) that must be both read and written by both machines. For compatibility with other devices I would prefer to keep a native PC file system on the drives. Note that I already have these drives.

At any rate could someone tell me if I have this right:

0) If I do nothing special OS X should be able to mount them as generic external USB drives and access them in a read-only fashion at full speed?

1) With windows running in an OS X bootcamp partition I will be able to read & write to the drive normally for both NTFS and FAT32 with no limitations and full speed access?

2) With Macfuse, a freeware utility, installed in OS X I should be able to both read and write an NTFS drive but with serious speed penalties?

3) If the drives are formated in FAT 32 then OS X should be able to read and write them on it's own without speed problems, correct? Can OS X format a 200GB Fat 32 volume? According to MS, Vista can not and it seems to me the last time I had this problem XP couldn't either and I had to find an old copy of DOS (the only error-free version of windows).

4) If I format the external disks under the OS X file system windows will neither read or write them, correct? And a seperate copy of something like Macdrive will be required on each windows machine. Are there speed penalties using macdrive on the PC side?

5) Any plan B?

I should have thought of this earlier since this is going to be the absolute most important job the laptop must do.

Thanks in advance yet again.....
Doug

 

answers to some of your questions:

yes, you can connect your external hard drive with mac and mac will recognized them immediately without installing anything. Windows has go through "find a new hardware" "installing drivers"

Yes, Mac OSX can read and write FAT32. I use WD 500G external hard drive and I can read and write both on windows and mac OSX.

You can format it as FAT format so that windows and mac can both read and write. I do not think that windows can read the HTFS+ format.
That is all I know.

 

Correct.

Correct. OS X can read NTFS at full speed.

Macfuse not a great solution. If you can get it to work it's touchy and not very fast.

OS X has no problem formatting large drives in FAT32.

I use Macdrive on my windows machine(s), and don't notice any slow down.

Probably best to have the drives formatted to FAT32 unless you expect to be dealing with files larger than 4GB. If you're going to be dealing with large files(remember to consider archives(.tar, .zip, etc) in this), then partition some of your drive to NTFS and install windows with Parallels of VMware Fusion.

 

Thanks very much to both of you!

One quick clarification if you don't mind --- in bootcamp can windows write to an external NTFS volume? Or is vmware required?

Doug

 

OS X Disk Utilities can format for FAT. It is FAT32.

 

Bootcamp can read/write NTFS, as it's windows. I was just suggesting a virtual machine so that you wouldn't have to reboot, and also with a virtual machine you can take the file from your OS X partition, drag it into Windows, and then drag it into the USB hard drive.

A work around to all this file moving would be to allow your Windows partition to access your OS X partition. This is generally considered a bad idea, as it would allow any Windows viruses you might pick up access to OS X files.

 

Perfect!

I think that completely answers my question and it's not the sort of thing I'd expect a sales person to be able to answer.

It's for storing pictures on the road so the Fat 32 option is probably going to be the least problematic and two of the three drives I have are already formatted that way anyway. If the mac can format the third drive itself than I don't have to pray a 20-odd year old diskette with MS DOS can be found in operable condition.

Basically I need to go from CF to external disk on the road with the ability to analyze the raw files. Once home they have to be sorted from the portable drives to the main system. 1000's of files per trip but no single files large enough to cause a problem with Fat32. Though the macbook's internal drive might be large enough for a short trip I want the files duplicated on a separate unit as a hedge against catastrophe and using an external drive is the fastest way to move all the files at trip's end.

Thanks again!
Doug