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Formatting External Hard drives for editing both in Mac and PC
Hi
I do teach editing at a university. The students have access to Premiere on Macs. But some students have PCs at home so they want to be able to move between both systems.I’ve seen that they can open Premiere in both Mac and PCs when using the exact same version.
So I’m now looking at what the best options to format their drives are.
The options I can think of are:
1- Formatting their drives as Mac Os Extended (Journaled) and use a program to allow their PCs to read and write on their drives (like HFSExplorer, Paragon HFS+ or MacDrive) – Faster when working on Mac, I don’t fully know how the drives will be performing in PC2- Formatting their drives as Fat32 – Compatible both in Mac and PC but the files are limited to 4Gb
3- Formatting their drives as ExFat – Compatible both in Mac and PC and the files are not limited to any size. But I’ve read ExFat is prone to corruption and makes the drives really slow to read in Mac
4- Create a partition on their drives with both Mac Os Extended and ExFat – I suppose they could have their material in the ExFat partition and write in the Mac partition when working in Mac. When working in PC they would just use the ExFat partition. Would this be enough or would still be too slow to use for editing?
5- Have two hard drives, one with the partition (Mac Os Extended and ExFat) and another with NTFS -so they could use ExFat to copy anything in between the systems, while they use for editing drives in the OS format.
I would appreciate your thoughts.
Thanks
Mac Pro (Mid 2010)
2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
24Gb 1066 MHz DDR3 EECC
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
Mercury Yosemite -
3 Replies
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You seem to have a good grasp of your options so I have nothing to add there. I have 2TB Western Digital MyPassport drives that I believe came formatted as exFAT to go between my Mac and Windows computers and it has been performing fine. Not as fast as HFS+ drives but certainly fast enough to transfer video files.
I also use Paragon HFS+ for Windows and NTFS for Mac and both have been working fine. My Mac Pro has Bootcamp so I use HFS+ for Windows to read my Mac drives from the Windows partition and NTFS for Mac to write to my Windows drives from the Mac partition. (macOS can already read NTFS).
I would let the students decide. Probably the simplest solution is to tell the PC users to format their drive as exFAT on their PC. Do not format it on the Mac. I have run into compatibility issues if you format the drive on the Mac but formatting it with Windows seems to keep both OS’s happy.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com -
Hi John,
thanks for your response.I’m interested in hearing more from your experience if possible as I personally never dealt with this situation before (with an editing drive)
So, have you edited with an external drive formatted (in PC) as exFAT? if so, how limiting was it?
Also, have you edited when using Paragon HFS+ in Windows or NTFS for Mac? Again, how limiting was it?
Thanks for your time.
Best
Mac Pro (Mid 2010)
2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
24Gb 1066 MHz DDR3 EECC
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
Mercury Yosemite -
I’ve worked with NTFS formatted drives and they work without issue on both mac and pc.
I Hate Television. I Hate It As Much As Peanuts. But I Can’t Stop Eating Peanuts.
– Orson Welles
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