April 18, 201115 yr Hi all. Basically i am after some advice on the best free way to be able to read and write to a mac-formatted hdd on a pc. I do a lot of video and photo work, currently have most of my work stored on a 2TB g-raid drive which is about 75% full. I was away for a year last year which was when i bought a macbook pro and the drive, which have been wonderful, but my pc now that i am back home wipes the floor with it in terms on video editing performance. I need to be able to access the files on the mac drive from the pc, and need to be able to edit off it (not an issue speed wise with esata(pc) firewire 800(mac)). Ideally i'd just reformat the thing in exfat and not have any issues but i don't have 1.5TB of storage space lying around to put all the stuff in transit whilst i reformat it. I have tried macdrive and it accomplished what i needed in terms of being able to explore the drive from the pc but i didn't ever try to edit of it with the pc. Is there any reason why it would be slower in reading/writing using macdrive on a pc over esata than doing the same to an ntfs/exfat drive? The issue with macdrive is that it costs $50 and i'm rather very cash-strapped at the moment, does anyone know of a free-ware alternative? I'm open to all suggestions, thanks for your time :) "A disbelief in magic can force some poor souls into believing in authority and business"
April 18, 201115 yr You should be able to use a cross-over cable (assuming that both had an ethernet port) in order to transfer files from one to another, I've never tried video editing with it. Though, I'm relatively sure using a separate medium of data transfer from one computer to another would be slower than just running it off the computer itself.
April 18, 201115 yr This is also my biggest frustration with using mac and windows. I would suggest buying another 1TB external and putting a simple driver on your macbook that allows it to read and write to ntfs drives. I found it on the Apple website: NTFS on Mac If you're concerned with how it would work I can try it out if you'd like. Unless someone else has a better solution this is what I would do if you're going to end up spending $50 on macdrive.
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