Paragon NTFS for mac or HFS for windows - do I need it when using a shared folder?

[John_Toolbox]

I recently set up a shared 1TB usb external drive, that is connected to my mac(OSX 10.6.8), and formatted as Mac OS Extended(journaled).

My PC running windows 7 x64 sees it fine, and doesn't seem to have a problem reading or writing files to it.

Do I really need one of the Paragon products to share files between the two OS's? Am I going to end up with data corruption if I don't use it? I'm a little confused as to why this seems to work fine so far without adding any of this paragon type software.

[John_Toolbox]

Really? No one else had tried this?

Well, for a week it has worked perfectly for me, I have moved at least 100GB of files between the two machines without issue. I think the only time you'd need the paragon software would be if connecting an external usb or fw drive of the HFS format directly to the PC. Connecting it to the mac and sharing over the network appears to work differently. It's so easy to set up, I know that as long as I have both a mac and a PC I will never need any of the paragon software.

[manik]

Though my case is not exactly the same, the condition may be similar...

I am using a PC with dual boot of OSX 10.7.3 (Hackintosh) and Win7 x64. The HDD drivers are:

SATA 500GB 7200rpm HFS+ for OSX system, installs PT10.2 Mac
SATA 500GB 7200rpm NTFS for Win system, installs PT10.2 Win
SATA 1TB 7200rpm HFS+ for common data storage
SATA 128GB(SSD) NTFS for large sound samples

then I installed Paragon "NTFS for Mac" and and "HFS+ for Win" on each side. Both PT versions are working very fine, placing my projects to 1TB HFS+ disk. Everything works fine and I don't have to think which format type was applied to each partition.

When I try to benchmark of the data HDD from Windows using Crystal Disk Mark, both NTFS and HFS+ partitions could write/read in at around 100MB/s speed. (I did not check the performance of NTFS W/R access from OSX, because I could not fine a good tool to measure it.)

[John_Toolbox]

Good to know. For my application, I have a 1TB external that includes audio files that I manipulate with both a pc and a mac, I dont like rebooting, and in the past I tried parallels, but it made my mac system unstable. When using an external that was formatted in FAT, it always seemed to suffer from slow performance on one machine depending on which OS I formatted it with. The shared folder trick seems to work great for me so far, I dont think I'm getting 100MB/s, but the performance is great so far.

[Shan]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

I recently set up a shared 1TB usb external drive, that is connected to my mac(OSX 10.6.8), and formatted as Mac OS Extended(journaled).

My PC running windows 7 x64 sees it fine, and doesn't seem to have a problem reading or writing files to it.

Do you have Pro Tools running on your PC as well? What version? The Pro Tools installer on PC also installs an HFS+ Driver by MediaFour.

Unfortunately though, 10.2 no longer has the HFS+ driver installer, so you'll need to purchase MacDrive or Paragon HFS+ for Windows for that specific release.

Shane

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Shan

Do you have Pro Tools running on your PC as well? What version? The Pro Tools installer on PC also installs an HFS+ Driver by MediaFour.

Unfortunately though, 10.2 no longer has the HFS+ driver installer, so you'll need to purchase MacDrive or Paragon HFS+ for Windows for that specific release.

Shane

Interesting, I don't have pro tools on the pc. Haven't tried it, but I don't think an hfs drive will work connected directly to it. it certainly does work with the drive connected to the mac, with file sharing enabled for the drive though. I was always under the assumption that a pc wouldnt be able to write to an hfs drive without special software like paragon, period... But it definitely can over the network.

[necjamc]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

Interesting, I don't have pro tools on the pc. Haven't tried it, but I don't think an hfs drive will work connected directly to it. it certainly does work with the drive connected to the mac, with file sharing enabled for the drive though. I was always under the assumption that a pc wouldnt be able to write to an hfs drive without special software like paragon, period... But it definitely can over the network.

Except for 10.2 (although you can grab the installer from 10.0) with the version of Mac drive that installs you can read and write to HFS drives on PC without an issue. But not at all without "helper" app. But as stated with pro tools comes with it free