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MacDrive 5
By Steve Manke Getting a Mac to read a disk formatted for use on a Windows system has been possible for many years. Getting a Windows system to read a Mac formatted disk is an entirely different story. A few cracker-jack solutions have come and gone over the years, but none have stood the test of time. With the widespread acceptance of FireWire, a new product has arrived that truly does allow this feature. MediaFour has release a product aptly named MacDrive 5. I recently had the satisfaction of sitting down to try it out. Installing it on my Windows 2000 system was easier than any other Windows application I have used. Since the software essentially does one thing, the installation leaves little configuration. Once the software was installed, and I had rebooted, I wondered how easy it would be to get the product up and functional. Being a Mac user I expected to simply plug in my Mac formatted FireWire drive to have it recognized by my PC. Few things in the Windows world are that easy, but much to my satisfaction this one was! As soon as Windows recognized the drive on the bus, the drive icon was added to My Computer. Since it was a formatted Mac HFS+, the standard hard drive icon now had a small apple icon superimposed over it. Once the drive was mounted, Windows treated the drive just as it would any other removable hard drive. With that in mind, I was interested in seeing how the drive performed when compared to a volume formatted in a native Windows NTFS format. For my test I considered two scenarios. I took a single file that was 500MB in size. I then took a folder containing thousands of small files totaling 500MB. The folder contained 62,254 files and 1,067 folders. I then copied each of them to the FireWire drive once with the drive formatted as a Windows NTFS volume, and then again formatted as a Mac HFS+ volume. The results were surprising. I was afraid that I would lose performance based on some sort of file system emulation. In fact, I was quite wrong. The Mac compatible format actually preformed better on the Windows system than the NTFS drive! The performance increase is substantial. This is likely due to the fact that, since the drive is formatted on a Mac in HFS+, it does not have the overhead that NTFS has when it allows untold levels of granular permission to be enforced on every file in the file system. For example, if you get Properties on a file located on the NTFS volume (Illustration A), there are many more options. On the HFS+ volume (Illustration B), you have options compliant with the Mac OS. The HFS+ volume allows you fewer permissions than you have on a standard NTFS volume and there are less properties as a result. This is likely the cause of the performance increase. Illustration A Illustration B There is no reason to think that your files are any less secure on the Mac volume. Microsoft's NTFS file system was originally designed for a Server operating system. For all intensive purposes, files are just as secure on the MacDrive volume as the files residing on the NTFS side. Given the power and versatility of MacDrive 5, I would recommend it to anyone who has the need to move data between a Mac and a PC frequently. It is much more efficient than transferring files over a network. Since you can add and remove FireWire hard drives from either system without ever having to reboot, you essentially double the value of your drive by just installing MacDrive 5. MacDrive came to my attention after reading an impressive review written by James Coats in the Chicago Tribune several months ago. In his article he explained that he had used MacDrive 5 to mount a Mac formatted disc on his Windows machine. This piqued the interest of OWC as a possible use of our drives that we had previously not examined. Of course FireWire drives work as well on the Mac as they do on the PC, but actively sharing the same drive between two systems without having to reformat was intriguing. When we actually put the drive through its paces, we were even more impressed. So much so that we now offer MacDrive as an option when our customers order FireWire drives. It is worth mentioning that MacDrive works equally well with USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 hard drives and is the easiest way to move massive amounts of data between a Mac and a PC. MacDrive brings a feature to Windows that it should have out of the box. It may only do one thing, but it does it very well. |