Macs and NTFS external drives

Evil-I

Evil-I

Evil-I

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Joined
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Gloucestershire
Hi There,

I've got to put together a kit of parts for a video project on an external hard drive to be available for both mac and pc. It's an After Effects project that includes broadcast quality video.

The issue? Some of the video files are VERY big, one for instance is 17Gb. Now if the external drive is formatted as FAT32 it has the 4Gb file size limit, yet if I format it as NTFS, I understand mac users might have trouble accessing it?

So what is the situation with Macs and the NTFS file system?

All advice greatly appreciated.

E-I
 
Evil-I said:
Hi There,

I've got to put together a kit of parts for a video project on an external hard drive to be available for both mac and pc. It's an After Effects project that includes broadcast quality video.

The issue? Some of the video files are VERY big, one for instance is 17Gb. Now if the external drive is formatted as FAT32 it has the 4Gb file size limit, yet if I format it as NTFS, I understand mac users might have trouble accessing it?

So what is the situation with Macs and the NTFS file system?

All advice greatly appreciated.

E-I
Click to expand...

Snow Leopard, 10.6 (and possibly 10.5) support Read Only NTFS. Depending on what you want the other people to do with the files on your removable HDD it may be a good or a bad thing (do they need to edit or just view the content?).

The only other method would be getting the mac users to install an NTFS "reader"/driver that allows full read/write access.

http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

There are others as well.


rp2000
 
Thanks for the reply.

I'd rather not put the users in a position where they have to download/ install additional software to get this to work?

I suppose I could make two partitions on the external drive? One NTFS and the other native OSX? What filesystem do macs use by default? I'm guessing there isn't a file size limit of 4gb like there is on fat32?

Best wishes,

E-I
 
Just found out that apparently any version of OSX of 10.41 or later will read ntfs volumes (read only though). For this project I think that's fine, as the external hard drive is just a transfer medium anyway. They can receive the drive strap it to their machine and copy the entire lot to their local drives.

Thanks,

E-I
 
Skully said:
That's what rp2000 said :p
Click to expand...

Actually he said that 10.6 definately did and maybe 10.5 might :-) I just mentioned that after checking in more detail it seems it was something that was in place from 10.41 onward, I did pay attention, honest guvnor ;-)

But yes, after thinking about it I think that using NTFS will be fine as long as I document the fact so that people are aware of it.

Thanks for the help all, I think I have a plan!

E-I
 
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