macbook and external hdd (ntfs) - playback freezes

Soldato
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Hey guys. I posted a thread in the hard drive forum but didnt have much luck. Seeing as this is mac related I thought I'd post a more detailed thread here.

I bought a wd 500gb 5000aaks sata drive and an icy box usb 2.0 enclosure.
I set that up and then formatted the drive as ntfs in windows.

Once I connected it to my macbook I realised it was read-only. Being too stubborn to change over to fat32 I found MacFuse and ntfs-3g which allowed me to mount the drive and read/write to it. All worked out well, or so I thought.

Now the issue I am having is that video or audio playback from the external drive freezes up every so often. Zefan suggested in my other thread that it was a setting from backup to data drive that would sort it out, although I have no idea where or how that works.

I was hoping someone here would know how to solve the issue. Is it because its an ntfs formatted drive? Is it because of the usb 2.0? Or are there actually settings to maintain bandwidth throughout so that I get playback without freezes?

Thanks
Asim
 
chex said:
tbh the easiest thing to do is to format it as hfs+ or fat32

How big of a difference will that make though? What are the advantages of the hfs+ file format over ntfs?
 
asim said:
How big of a difference will that make though? What are the advantages of the hfs+ file format over ntfs?

HFS+ will provide much better performance with Mac OSX, but you can't use it is easily with Windows though
 
what he said

if you're not using windows anymore go to hfs+, or fat32 if you are

All my videos and music are on an external drive and they play fine, even on my 7 year old laptop with only USB1.1

you can use macopener or macdrive to access hfs+ on windows, which may work bettter than what you're using to access ntfs from osx
 
Last edited:
yeah its a read pain that mac os doesn't support ntfs.. i mean i love my mac soooo much... but it just need a few little tweaks to be perfect. best idea mate is to setup your drive on the windows machine and use networking to read and write to it, or format it in macs file format, or fat32 ( no good for me tho, it cant take files bigger that 4gig ) I went for a network solution in the end. i also use a 160 gig usb 2 split HSF and NTFS for backup purposes, not the most ideal solution... but it works!

ps windows should get mac file system supported sharpish too!
 
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