Switching bewteen Windows and OSX on Intel Macs and my array

[Simon Blackledge]

Not an expert in this but pretty sure no.

Your only option if you must share media with PC and OSX is a fast network with a Server that can share media to either computer. SD is ok over gigE.. depends what you “need” to be able to do though…

what pc apps cant you use on osx you need?

P

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Ricardo,

The internal disk array of the Mac Pro is capable of simple capture and playback of 10-bit HD material. If you start using lots of nested sequences and effects, you should seriously consider an external disk array which will cost more but will provide great reliability.

Regardless of whether you choose to use an internal or external disk array, your question about how to use the one disk array with both Mac OS X and Windows is a good one. It might be possible but I don’t know anyone who has done that for mission-critical work and so you need to consider the following points:

1. The Bootcamp facility in Mac OS X, which enables you to run Windows XP or Vista, is still beta software. While it does work extremely well for most people, you won’t be able to obtain help from Apple if you encounter any issues. The readme file with Bootcamp stresses this point.

2. There is software available for Windows which enables it to read Mac-formatted disks including disk arrays. It is named MacDrive 6 CrossStripe Edition. It is designed to be used with an external disk array and assumes that you have striped your disk array using software such as ATTO Express Stripe which can be used with ATTO SCSI or fibre channels cards. I suggest you read the system requirements for this software so you will know what to buy.

3. I would not be surprised if the use of MacDrive on Windows meant that the disk array could not be accessed as quickly as a native NTFS stripe created by the Disk Manager in Windows. This is just my speculation and it might be incorrect. Therefore I would recommend you test this and/or ask around before committing yourself to this workflow.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Alexander Falk]

one important thing is, that windows doesn’t recognize more than 2 gb of ram when running on a mac pro.

the raid-thing should be okay if you want to use windows only. stripe the 3 drives to one ntfs-volume.

[Ricardo Ellstein]

Hi everybody,

Thanks for answering my post. There’s a lot of great info there. I’m going to try and find out if the array will be slower using Macdrive, and if I get any solid info, I’ll put it up for all to read.

Also, is it true that if you run Windows on a Mac it only uses 2GB of RAM? This would seriously affect my decision, since I’m thinking of getting an 8 procesor Mac, and they recommend at leat 1 GB of RAM per processor to use with AE.

The reason I want this setup is beacause I already own a lot of PC software that I’d like to continue to use it with the new machine. I think switching everything to Mac would be a bit of a hassle… I don’t think that transfer bewtween OS’s, even using the same programs is effortless, and we have to keep up our response times.

Thanks again, and I’ll keep you posted.

Ricardo

[Alexander Falk]

we have 6 mac pro’s at the moment.
they all have 4 gb of ram built in and the current version of bootcamp installed.
if you switch to windows it only recognizes 2gb ram, no matter how you order them in the riser-cards.

—–

4 x Avid Media COmposer Adrenaline 2.7
1 x Avid Media Composer 2.7
1 x Avid Symphony Nitris 1.6.3
1 x Avid DS Nitris 7.6

1 x Decklink HD Pro PCI-X 4:4:4
1 x Decklink HD Extreme
1 x Decklink SD Pro
2 x Decklink SD Extreme

1 x Workgroup Videohub
4 x HDLink