Ian Cook

Hi all, im going to be moving over to a Macbook pro soon for my picture editing, and i want to get a NAS with RAID so i can have some form of protection on my files, my question is can OSX read Fat32 or NTFS partitions? as i want to back my stuff up on to the raid drive before i get the new macbook and want to be sure i am able to read the drive after the event if you see what i mean

Thanks in advance

Simon C

Yes, 10.4 can read NTFS disks. My g4 lappy had no probs reading my NTFS formatted HDD archive.

RichB

My work colleague has had 2 NAS drives now and both have failed.

I think if it were me, I'd get a USB/FW800 external 500gb or whatever drive, gt everything on that, get the MBP, copy it all across and then use TimeMachine with the external as your back up device.

Timemachine on Leopard backs up hourly files that have changed every hour/day and you can go back to any previous version easily.

Problem with that is if the reason you want NAS is to share with other machines. Time machine backups and compresses.

Fat32 has a max file size of 4gb I think but OSX will read devices formatted ok. I have a Storovision card reader/hdd that was Fat32 and its fine.

Markus

OS X can read both FAT32 (think it'll also do FAT16 but don't quote me on that) and NTFS formatted disks. However, by default, only FAT32 disks are read/write. NTFS drives will be mounted read-only.

There is something called MacFUSE which should allow read/write NTFS, however I'm not sure how reliable it is. There's obviously a good reason why Apple does not implement read/write for NTFS drives by default, and you'd have thought with BootCamp they would have done so as it'd allow you to modify your PC disk when in OS X, so I'm always wary of third party things messing at file system level.

Simon C

OOOps my bad. I keep thinking XP was ntfs, mine wasn't so is FAT32 and the G4 could read and write with no probs.


Markus, I think you may have just put a damp squib on me going 10.5. I was hoping time machine would just copy my files to a Fat32 raid array. Periodically I will want a full backup done but weekly I will want folders that contain my pics copied / moved to the raid.

Markus

If the raid is FAT32 then 10.5 should be able to use it as a time machine backup drive, provided we are talking local access and not network access. If it's network access then you'll need to ensure the raid can be mounted via AFP as that is currently all time machine supports.

Simon C

Network

Why wont my ideas work damn them!!!!

Ian Cook

OK thanks for the replies, i dont necessarily need NAS but it would mean i could share the data, i really do need the ability to use at least Raid 1 though.

SO as long as i use FAT32 disks i should still be able to read/write to my external drives with no issues ?

Markus

As far as I am aware, yes, you'll be able to have read/write access to FAT32 formatted drives from Mac OS X.

KiwiGTI

You could have a look at these, one of the Linux magazines rated them very highly. They do seem very impressive especially with the builtin ability to act as web servers/media servers etc as well.

There are single and quadruple disk versions available as well.

QNap Turbo Station TS-209 NAS Enclosure

Ian Cook

Cheers mate, i actually have been looking at those, nice to have it confirmed though

Markus

Interesting box that. As it's running linux you can plop netatalk 2.0.3 on it and thus it'll handle AFP (AFP3 to be precise) very handy.