HOW YOU ARE FORMATTING YOUR DRIVES?

[Nick Morrison]

Hey guys, how are you all formatting your drives for media managing on set? MAC FORMATTED? PC FORMATTED? EXFAT? What are you all finding the most reliable?

At Astronaut, we live on both MAC and PC, and are struggling to find the perfect drive solution. We find MAC FORMATTED drives the most stable, but they run slower on our Avid PC system (we have to use "Mac Drive" which creates a bottleneck).

FAT35 has a file size limit, so that's no good.

And EXFAT has been working recently, but one of our colleagues has mentioned it may not be as stable as other configurations.

So what are you all doing that delivers the best combination of speed and reliability?

 

[Michael Romano]

I've had good luck with paragon NTFS when moving from Mac to PC world. Hadn't noticed much in the way of bottlenecking but I usually pass it off from our Mac shop to other PC shops so I can't speak for the other side. I too have heard horror stories about EXFAT but haven't tried it out myself. MacOS (HFS+ Journaled) has been the magic bullet for us and only switching over to NTFS via paragon for when we have to. FAT32 is a joke, not even considered. I have dappled in Ext3/4 in the past but broad compatibility in the PC world has always hindered those linux formats.

Best luck!

 

[Subhadip Sen]

For Windows - OS X interoperability I have always used ExFAT. Hasn't let me down so far but of course some may not have been as lucky. NTFS with Paragon on the OS X side is an option, as is HFS+ with MacDrive on Windows.