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Portable hard drive recommendations for client raw footage delivery
Hello all. I recently purchased a hard drive (“my passport”) that I thought would work for delivering raw footage, but turns out my client can’t use it on their PC. I did read something in the manual about using with both – but you had to format the drive as FAT32 which comes with a file limitation of 4GB and so will not work for raw footage. Are there any reasonably priced drives that will work for transferring large files between operating systems without reformatting?
Thanks!
Karen
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6 Replies
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Reformat your drive with the NTFS file system, which supports file sizes larger than 4GB.
You’ll need to install software on your Mac that will allow you to write to NTFS volumes. Here are two options:
https://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/
https://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/
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Thanks Alan!
Does this mean that such a drive does not exist? If I know what my end editor will be using, then I can format for that but is there no drive that can live in both systems?
Thanks,
Karen -
[karen cummings] “Does this mean that such a drive does not exist? “
That is true. There is no drive currently sold that comes pre formatted in a way that can be read and written to on Windows and Mac (excluding FAT32, of course).
NTFS cannot be written to on Mac without additional software. HFS+ cannot be read/written on PC without additional software.
The ExFAT format can be read/written on recent OS’s on PC’s and Macs and has large file support. It requires no additional software. There are no drives that I know of that come pre-formatted using this relatively new drive format. You can easily reformat any drive to ExFAT using Disk Utility, if you are running Snow Leopard or later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
I have Paragon and tend to use NTFS, but have tried ExFAT a couple of times and its worked.
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[karen cummings] “Does this mean that such a drive does not exist? If I know what my end editor will be using, then I can format for that but is there no drive that can live in both systems? “
Unfortunately there is no magic drive format that works equally well on both platforms – it’s a compromise. NTFS is a Windows file system, and HFS+ is a Mac file system. Macs can natively read, but not write to NTFS formatted drives without additional software. Windows PCs cannot natively read HFS+ formatted drives, but can do so using MacDrive software.
There are NAS (network-attached storage) devices that use other file systems (like xfs) that are platform agnostic, but NAS devices are not recommended for editing because their transfer speed is not fast enough for adequate editing performance.
Your only real options are to use an NTFS formatted drive (with the appropriate software on your Mac) or an HFS+ drive (with MacDrive on the PC). Either option would work, but if you don’t want your client to have to purchase the MacDrive software, then NTFS is probably the best option.
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Thank you John!
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Thanks Alan!
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