Mac vs PC HD's

[Christien]

Are Mac and PC hard drives formatted differently? Our band is recording in a studio next weekend, and the guy said if I brought a hard drive I can take the Pro Tools session and audio files with me. Problem is, he's on Mac, I'm on PC.

Is a hard drive a hard drive, or are there different ones for Mac and PC? Can I just dump the hard drive into my PC and read even just the audio in a raw format? Any software I can get to read a Mac drive, if they're different?

Thanks for any help!

Chris

[id10t]

NTFS is different than the mac format (HPFS or UFS), but both can read/write to FAT32. So just format your external drive as FAT32 and you are good to go.

(Win98 reads fat32 as well, as does Linux, but then Linux reads darn near everything...)

[Joeaksa]

Chris,

No idea on the HD's but wonder if you could take an USB external hard drive? I would think that a USB drive might work on both computers but not sure.

Otherwise how about taking a handful of DVD disks and recording the info there?

Joe

[Christien]

Thanks for the responses so far. I never though of an external USB drive - that might be the best. DVDRs are out of the question - we're talking about hundreds of gigabytes worth of data. Figure probably 10 GB per song, and we'll hopefully get 15+ songs down, depending on time. I think a 250GB or so HD is the only way to go.

[id10t]

Ah... then you are going to have other problems... FAT32 and NTFS can't handle single files larger than 2 or 4gb.

Any kind of compression - even lossless - will take forever and a day to get done.

I'd lean towards a USB enclosure with a drive as big as you can get, and a cheap mac to use it with (new mac mini, or something used)

[stomachmonkey]

Originally posted by id10t
Ah... then you are going to have other problems... FAT32 and NTFS can't handle single files larger than 2 or 4gb.

Any kind of compression - even lossless - will take forever and a day to get done.

I'd lean towards a USB enclosure with a drive as big as you can get, and a cheap mac to use it with (new mac mini, or something used)

If the engineer is any good you should not need to worry about the file size.

He is not going to record, or should not record, the entire session to one file. That makes editing/searching a nightmare. He is going to record clips and log them so you can make sense of them later.

Even still if you do the math, 16 bit at 44.000 is going to get you an hour of music per (depending on drives block allocation size) 700-800 mb's so 2 hours straight is still under 2 gb.

Just get a big external firewire drive and format FAT 32. Macs can read/write FAT but can only read NTFS.

You can generally find dual interface USB/Firewire drives in plus 200 GB capacity for $150.

Stay away from those Western Digital "Book" drives. I have had trouble with them as well as other people I know.

[Christien]

The individual files won't be anywhere near 2 GB. Each mic/line will be recorded to a separate audio file - one 3 minute song would typically consist of 8 drum mics, 1 bass, 2 guitars and three vocal lines, so 14 sound files total, each the length of the song, so say 3 min. So what we get is 14 x ~30 MB, (assuming mono 16-bit, 44.1) so maybe just under half a GB total data per song, but a bunch of small files. Of course, we'll probably record in 96K 32 bit, so quadruple that, but still way under 2GB per file.

[Christien]

Originally posted by stomachmonkey

Just get a big external firewire drive and format FAT 32. Macs can read/write FAT but can only read NTFS.

You can generally find dual interface USB/Firewire drives in plus 200 GB capacity for $150.

Stay away from those Western Digital "Book" drives. I have had trouble with them as well as other people I know.

Ok, thanks for the tip about the WD book drives - I was just looking at them this morning. I can get anywhere between 250 and 320GB for under $200, which is amazing.

If I format FAT32 on WinXP, then hook it up to the Mac, it'll read/write ok? Or should I format it on the Mac?

What about then pluggin it into WinXP after everything's been dumped from the Mac? Will Windows read it ok?

Thanks again!

[id10t]

Format it on a windows machine, and you'll be able to read/write on windows, mac, *nix, etc. no problems.

You should be able to get a 200-300gb drive for $100 or less, another 40 or so for an external enclosure for it. Consider a firewire enclosure and firewire card for your PC to use it with (another $30 or so). Still under the Book cost.

Originally posted by Christien
Ok, thanks for the tip about the WD book drives - I was just looking at them this morning. I can get anywhere between 250 and 320GB for under $200, which is amazing.

If I format FAT32 on WinXP, then hook it up to the Mac, it'll read/write ok? Or should I format it on the Mac?

What about then pluggin it into WinXP after everything's been dumped from the Mac? Will Windows read it ok?

Thanks again!

[Christien]

Awesome - thanks so much for the help you guys!

Chris

[stomachmonkey]

Originally posted by Christien
Ok, thanks for the tip about the WD book drives - I was just looking at them this morning. I can get anywhere between 250 and 320GB for under $200, which is amazing.

If I format FAT32 on WinXP, then hook it up to the Mac, it'll read/write ok? Or should I format it on the Mac?

What about then pluggin it into WinXP after everything's been dumped from the Mac? Will Windows read it ok?

Thanks again!

You can format from either box.

Whenever I set up a dual platform drive I always format on the PC. My rationale is the Mac is the most flexible in terms of media that it can use.

Or put another way I'd rather make sure it works on the PC before putting files on it because I'm comfortable that I won't have issues on the Mac side.

Kinda like making sure you can get the fill plug open on the tranny before you open the drain plug.

Simply hooking it up to a Mac won't do anything to a drive that makes it unusable under XP.

Make sure the engineer keeps a back up of the files for a couple of days.