OS X and Windows Filesystem interoperability

So you’ve get a Mac, because you got fed up with the Windows world, and thought a Mac is fancier than a Linux box. You might be right. Now you still have some people or your own other computers with Windows installed or have an external drive - formatted with NTFS so you could store files bigger than 2 GB on it.

Now you plug your external NTFS drive into your Mac box - and see that it can only read the stuf, but not write. Too bad - you wanted to copy that movie for your friend. Now what?

You’ve heard about Bootcamp, install it, and hold the option key while booting to get into Windows. Now you can write to the drive, but unfortunately the file you wanted to copy is on your Macintosh hard drive which is a HFS+ partition and, of course, Windows cannot read that… Oh fuck.

What can be done?

Well it turns out you have lots of options now… at least 3.

1. Install Parallels Desktop on your Mac. Install Windows XP (at least) / Vista into it, then - since you can connect your mac drives to it as well - you can copy files however you want it. It needs at least 5 GB - 15 GB of hard drive space + at least 2 GB of ram to have it work correctly. Cost is $79.99 plus the cost of a Windows XP / Vista license.
2. Install Bootcamp, and Windows XP / Vista into it (you need a windows license as well!) Now install MacDrive 7.x into it. Reboot. Now you can access the Mac’s HFS+ partition for read / write operations plus all the DVD’s you’ve written using your Mac (with HFS on it) Pretty cool and fast. I have chosen this method, and have several external USB/FireWire drives with HFS+ on it. This might not be the best option if you’re willing to swap data with Windows friends Cost is $49.95 + a Windows XP / Vista license
3. Do not fiddle with Windows at all. This is the cheapest option of all, and the least troublesome - if you do not need to use Windows applications at all (not playing windows games or using some software) just need to access NTFS partitions for read / write access then just grab yoursef a copy of Paragon NTFS for Mac, install it, reboot, and voila’ you can now put those stupid video files to your friends external USB drive. It’s pretty fast, and you saved yourself lots of fiddling around. Since there’s an open source version NTFS driver as well, called NTFS-3g that runs with a thing called MacFuse, but installing that seemed quite hm… troublesome even for me. The cost of Paragon NTFS for Mac is $39.95. Install, reboot and done. That’s all.

Of course nothing saves you from doing as I do - namely: having MacDrive installed in my Bootcamp partition and my other Windows computers. Then installing Pragon NTFS on my Mac, while also having a copy of Parallels Desktop with Windows XP installed. That suits my needs since I use - need to use - some windows applications, and also want to have access to my HFS+ external drives / mac hard drive partitions occasionally on my Windows systems as well. Pick your choice

Have fun, comments and questions welcome.