Possible to Use OSX Formatted G Speed Shuttle (or other RAIDS) On PC Via TB3?

[Andy Maser]

I'm on the verge of telling Apple to piss off and pulling the trigger on a PC editing system. There's lots of great info here on builds, but what about the practicality of moving storage back and forth between a PC and Mac? Say you set your PC system up around an Intel CPU, included a TB3 PCI card and installed one of the programs that lets you read/write to OSX formatted drives. Would you be able to hook up something like a OSX formatted G Speed Shuttle RAID via TB3 and have it work well? If it works, are there performance issues?

Why bother? Because a lot of the people I collaborate with are still on Apple systems. I want to be able to playback half or full res R3Ds but I also can't totally put myself on a post production island. I need to be able to pass off a drive (or a Thunderbolt RAID) to someone on Mac and have them be able to run with things.


Thanks!

 

[Blair Thornton]

Well, if your Raid is HFS+, there this: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

If it's APFS, there's no solutions yet.

But be forewarned: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...-drivers/5eebce2d-c30f-4f23-8552-55101f8bc0df

 

[Andy Maser]

Wow, that's pretty much the sketchiest thing I could think of. So what's the answer for those of us who work mainly with RED footage and need to be able to collaborate with other people who are using Macs (basically everyone)?

Does a Hackintosh help deal with that? If it does, aren't you then forgoing a lot of the power benefits of PC?

 

[L. Langer]

All you have to do is use ExFAT. Windows/Mac compatibility is why Apple licensed it, as it's used in USB media and flash storage that is used on multiple platforms.

 

[Brendan H. Banks]

I HIGHLY recommend MacDrive Pro over Paragon. I personally have found it to work on all windows machines I've used, where Paragon seems to have conflicts and it can be hard to troubleshoot. I have it for my machines and I'm format-type agnostic now.

Sometimes with the TB2 interface I noticed you need to have the drive plugged in and powered on before booting - hotswap doesn't work with my custom build. I'm not as familiar with TB3 so don't take my word on that.

 

[Bobby Farokhzad]

I've been using the ExFat format for a while now with no issues whatsoever to transfer data from a Mac to a PC and back.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I'm on the verge of telling Apple to piss off and pulling the trigger on a PC editing system. There's lots of great info here on builds, but what about the practicality of moving storage back and forth between a PC and Mac? Say you set your PC system up around an Intel CPU, included a TB3 PCI card and installed one of the programs that lets you read/write to OSX formatted drives. Would you be able to hook up something like a OSX formatted G Speed Shuttle RAID via TB3 and have it work well? If it works, are there performance issues?

I would talk to G-Tech support first. I have heard anecdotally that there are speed issues trying to get a Mac-formatted G-RAID to run at speed on a Windows Thunderbolt connection. It could very well be that if you bypass HFS+ and go with something like ExFat, that would solve the problem.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

We’re using ExFat on all our multi-platform drives or portable storage that gets shuffled around. It’s not as robust as file systems like HPFS+, NTFS, APFS... But it’s compatible and no issues with speed and managing permissions and other such things is pretty easy.

While it’s possible to use HPFS on Windows with third party software and NTFS can be read on Mac (read+write needs third party software), it’s just never what it’s cracked up to be. If we need to access larger storage that’s formatted specific to either platform, we connect natively and access over the network.

Above it’s mentioned by Brendan_H_Banks that hot swapping TB2 devices does not work for him. That’s actually pretty common amongst Thunderbolt interfaces on PC. Some just don’t truly work as we’d like and it comes down to incomplete design and support, usually relating to firmware issues and/or driver compatibility. I have had much better luck with the newer TB3 setups, yet many are still half-baked.

 

[Andy Maser]

Thank you so much for all the valuable insight. It looks like G Technology pushes Paragon pretty hard for using their HPFS drives on Windows: https://www.g-technology.com/campaign/landing/windows-paragon. They basically make it sound like you should expect to have zero issues (not believing them until I try it myself). A collaborator of mine does speak really highly of that workflow. But, Brendan_H_Banks, I am super intrigued by MacDrive. They also pretty much say that their software is the best thing on Earth.

Takeaway: When drives come in the door formatted as HPFS and loaded with footage, there shouldn't be much reason to worry. And when I can start a project with fresh drives, ExFat sounds like maybe the better way to go. Either way, nobody should panic.

Winning all around.

 

[Brendan H. Banks]

Thank you so much for all the valuable insight. It looks like G Technology pushes Paragon pretty hard for using their HPFS drives on Windows: https://www.g-technology.com/campaign/landing/windows-paragon. They basically make it sound like you should expect to have zero issues (not believing them until I try it myself). A collaborator of mine does speak really highly of that workflow. But, Brendan_H_Banks, I am super intrigued by MacDrive. They also pretty much say that their software is the best thing on Earth.

Takeaway: When drives come in the door formatted as HPFS and loaded with footage, there shouldn't be much reason to worry. And when I can start a project with fresh drives, ExFat sounds like maybe the better way to go. Either way, nobody should panic.

Winning all around.

Awesome! Make sure only to install one driver for using HPFS drives at a time. I was testing Paragon vs MacDrive during the Demo phases and when they were both installed, some odd things happened. I'm sure Paragon works great, I just had a few issues and MacDrive worked out of the box. With MacDrive, just make sure you uncheck all of their "Auto Open" things. It'll open on boot, it'll open when you plug a drive in, etc. I hate pop-ups and the driver works without the main application window open. It's also great for repairing drives similar to how a Disk Utility would. In one case I found Disk Utility on OSX couldn't seem to get a drive to mount, but MacDrive ended up saving the day. Good luck!

 

[Dermot Shane]

Well, if your Raid is HFS+, there this: https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/

If it's APFS, there's no solutions yet.

But be forewarned: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...-drivers/5eebce2d-c30f-4f23-8552-55101f8bc0df

i have Paragon's APFS for windoze running for a few months now, have HFS+ running for a decade or more on mutiple machines - so far zero issues, even with the few APFS drives that have appeard at my doorstep
i update paragon whenever there's something new, maybe the folks on that forum are running older versions?

 

[Michael Wahba]

Awesome! Make sure only to install one driver for using HPFS drives at a time. I was testing Paragon vs MacDrive during the Demo phases and when they were both installed, some odd things happened. I'm sure Paragon works great, I just had a few issues and MacDrive worked out of the box. With MacDrive, just make sure you uncheck all of their "Auto Open" things. It'll open on boot, it'll open when you plug a drive in, etc. I hate pop-ups and the driver works without the main application window open. It's also great for repairing drives similar to how a Disk Utility would. In one case I found Disk Utility on OSX couldn't seem to get a drive to mount, but MacDrive ended up saving the day. Good luck!

Read through the thread but apologize I am still slightly confused on one thing:

If you use MacDrive Pro on my PC, can the drive be used on both mac and pc without the need to re-format? Regardless of format?

 

[Brendan H. Banks]

Read through the thread but apologize I am still slightly confused on one thing:

If you use MacDrive Pro on my PC, can the drive be used on both mac and pc without the need to re-format? Regardless of format?

Using MacDrive on a PC will allow you to read HFS drives and format new drives as HFS. That is the volume type standard for OSX so it'll read natively there. In layman's, MacDrive on Windows lets you read Mac hard drives.

 

[Michael Wahba]

Using MacDrive on a PC will allow you to read HFS drives and format new drives as HFS. That is the volume type standard for OSX so it'll read natively there. In layman's, MacDrive on Windows lets you read Mac hard drives.

Copy you, and using MacDrive, one can edit seamlessly a project file on both Mac and Windows machines then? This seems amazing and deserves more recognition. Hadn't ever heard of this and have always struggled with this issue.