Cyborg

I have a home network as follows:

Mac mini, hooked up to TV
NTFS formatted Maxtor USB external hard drive
Wireless network
Dell desktop
Dell laptop
MacBook

I have just got the MacBook, and was trying to set it up to see the USB hard drive, attached to the Mac Mini

Could not do it

Called Mac support, and they said that although the Mac mini can see the directly-connected drive, other Macs cannot see it (more precisely, connect to it). He said if iy was FAT32, no problem ... but that others out there may have a workaround for this.

If I hang the USB hard drive off the Dell desktop, I can connect fine from the Macbook.

I have also hung it off a Buffalo Terrastation, and that works fine.

Anyone got any workarounds on this .. the reason I need it connected directly to the MacMini is that it has media files on, and if i try to play to the TV by streaming over the wireless network I get stutter and lip-sync problems with movies.

If connected directly to MacMini these problems disappear.

Any thoughts ?

Tks

ITRocks

NTFS support is currently not really built into mac OS X properly (read support is supposedly there, but for me it's been hit & miss at best).

There was an article on a new ntfs driver with full read/write support for linux that will purportedly be ported to OS X at some time...
So hang in there and all might work soon...

Cyborg

Thanks. I guess my Q. now is more for curiosity, by what is the technical issue on this ? While the Macs may be nice in many departments, this type of issue is a real pain for those switching or looking to integrate Macs into their existing infrastructure, "home network" though it may be. http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ne...reply&p=235399#
Doctor

TechBoy

That is interesting that you have had issues reading NTFS drives on a Mac. Every time I have tried with external USB2 drives with NTFS all my Macs with Tiger have had no problems mounting or reading the NTFS drive. Of course OSX can not currently Write to NTFS, but I have never had a problem reading from any external formatted with NTFS.

Thanks for the info on the new NTFS driver for Linux. That is good news and I am sure it will find it's way into OSX eventually.

ITRocks

Why not use Fat32?

Cyborg

I note the other stated advantages of NTFS (http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=63) .. for what suxh a discussion is worth.

As a practical matter, to change it requires at least 250 MB of space I do not currently have, to back off my NTFS drive, reformat and reload.

You know the Mac ad about all the time it takes to set up a PC, while he goes and goofs off doing something else ... ???

ITRocks

Well that's true - they didn't mention anything about you hooking your mac up to NTFS harddrives did they?

Personally, I just format all my external drives to either FAT32 or HFS+. If a windows machine needs to access them, I'll set up an ethernet share through my macbook.
__________________

TechBoy

I seem to recall reading somewhere that NTFS could be written to, by a Mac, over a network, but I think it had to be through a PC or a Windows based server.

Cyborg

Is it me or was the issue that he couldnt see the drive attached to the mini over the network?

ITRocks

The technical issue is pretty simple. Microsoft in it's un-openness, is not interested in supporting HFS (hence why Windows can't even see a directly connected HFS volume), and does not share much information about their NTFS filesystem. That's why, by default Linux, UNIX and OS X can only read, but not write to NTFS. I think there are some 3rd party solutions, at least for Linux.
If you connect your drive to a PC, and access it over the network, the SMB protocol takes care of the "translation", which enables other systems to write to it, and it also enables Windows to read/write a HFS volume. So integrating Macs into an existing network infrastructure is not really an issue.

Connecting an USB/Firewire device directly to a computer has nothing to do with a network, no matter if it's a home network or any kind of business network.