External HDD with mixed Windows/Mac setup

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Park Seward

This wil let you use any Windows drive on your Mac:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Best $20 I ever spent

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by DanSteinberg

This discussion was interesting to me since I recently switched my setup to a dual OS system as well, as follows:

Field Recording Setup: Macbook Pro (10.8) with Pro Tools 10, and using an external Thunderbolt SSD drive to record to.

Home Studio Setup: Mac Mini running Windows 7 Boot Camp, Pro Tools 10, ideally using the same Thunderbolt SSD drive. The Mac mini does not have a drive bay for a 2nd internal drive other than the main system drive, so using an external drive is a necessity

Right now I had formatted the SSD drive as Fat-32, so that it could be read and written to by both the Mac laptop and the Window desktop.

My hope was to use the SAME SSD drive on BOTH the Mac laptop and Window Mac Mini, basically record sessions in the field on the mac laptop, to the external SSD drive, and then attach the same SSD drive to the Windows desktop when it's time to overdub and mix.

However, this is not working because on the Windows side, Pro Tools will not let me designate a FAT-32 formatted drive as a "record" drive, it says it needs to ne in the NTFS file system. With my old Windows system, I used a tower with an internal 2nd drive, and had it formatted as NTFS. So the fat-32 issue never came up before.

My issue is, if I format the external SSD drive as NTFS, then the Mac laptop won't be able to record sessions to it (OS X can read NTFS but not write to it).

I am not as familiar with the EXFat format. Is that as format that can be read and written to on both Mac and PC, and that the Mac and PC versions of Pro Tools will allow the drive to be designated as a record drive? If so, I am happy to give that a try.

Thanks!

Dan:
I have to ask - why are you running Windoze on the Mac Mini? Is there some program you absolutely need to use for you to do that? If you're just using Pro Tools on both Macs then why not run OSX on the Mini? Would be a lot simpler than doing what you're doing.

[DanSteinberg]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Dan:
I have to ask - why are you running Windoze on the Mac Mini? Is there some program you absolutely need to use for you to do that? If you're just using Pro Tools on both Macs then why not run OSX on the Mini? Would be a lot simpler than doing what you're doing.

A perfectly fair question. I run Windows on the Mac mini because in the main line of work I do, I require access to both an OS X and a Windows environment in my home office.

I work as a freelance product manager for assorted Pro Audio companies, and since the various hardware and software audio products I help design are meant to work with customers using the products with both Mac and Windows, I have to have access to both operating systems for when I am helping design/test/debug the different products I am involved in.

The reason I use a Mac Mini for the Windows side (as opposed to some more conventional PC hardware) is because it is low-noise. All of the PCs I have owned before were extremely noisy, and purchasing or custom-building a "silent PC" was not as affordable or easy to me as simply buying a Mac Mini for $600 or so, installing Windows 7 on boot camp, and using it as a 100% Windows machine. Whether it is during recording, or just listening to music while working on a product spec, I want my PC to be as silent as possible :)

I suppose I could boot up the Mini to the original Mac Partition when I am doing mixes, and use it in Windows the rest of the time, but that's a bit more complex solution that I'd like. Ideally the Windows machine could stay booted up in Windows at all times, and work with the external thunderbolt drive.

[DanSteinberg]

Originally Posted by Park Seward

This wil let you use any Windows drive on your Mac:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/

Thanks for the heads up about this software, this looks like it could be the solution.

So just to confirm before I buy the (admittedly very affordable) software, it would presumably allow me to use the following workflow below?

1-Install NTFS-Mac

2-Format my external thunderbolt drive as NTFS, as opposed to fat-32

3-The Mac will now be able to provide play AND record functions of OS X Pro Tools, and do so at speeds and stability that will be sufficient for Pro Tools with a large number of tracks? This is the main question for me, that whatever special magic that NTFS-drive is doing to make the NTFS format drive "writable" on the Mac, does so without any performance hit that messes up Pro Tools.

The whole reason I bought a drive with the specific combination of both an SSD disc on the inside, and a thunderbolt interface on the outside, was to be able to be really confident that I had a nice fast laptop recording solution, that Pro Tools could keep up with, and do so on a session using recording a large number of tracks at once onto the Powerbook laptop

4-Since the drive is now NTFS and not fat-32, it can be used to play and record on Pro Tools, on my Windows machine, since Pro Tools is happy with NTFS drives

Edit: Looks like the MTFS-Mac product has a free 10 day demo, so I will certainly give this product a try and see how it fares.

Thanks to everyone so far for all the great assistance so far!

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by DanSteinberg

A perfectly fair question. I run Windows on the Mac mini because in the main line of work I do, I require access to both an OS X and a Windows environment in my home office.

I work as a freelance product manager for assorted Pro Audio companies, and since the various hardware and software audio products I help design are meant to work with customers using the products with both Mac and Windows, I have to have access to both operating systems for when I am helping design/test/debug the different products I am involved in.

The reason I use a Mac Mini for the Windows side (as opposed to some more conventional PC hardware) is because it is low-noise. All of the PCs I have owned before were extremely noisy, and purchasing or custom-building a "silent PC" was not as affordable or easy to me as simply buying a Mac Mini for $600 or so, installing Windows 7 on boot camp, and using it as a 100% Windows machine. Whether it is during recording, or just listening to music while working on a product spec, I want my PC to be as silent as possible :)

I suppose I could boot up the Mini to the original Mac Partition when I am doing mixes, and use it in Windows the rest of the time, but that's a bit more complex solution that I'd like. Ideally the Windows machine could stay booted up in Windows at all times, and work with the external thunderbolt drive.

Thanks for the explanation. It's not all that more complex booting into Windoze than OSX and it would make your PT life a lot easier. Certainly a lot easier than what you're going through trying to write to a drive with both Windoze and OSX