In my experience, there's no perfect solution to this problem. What platform do you prefer?If you bought a Mac, I would assume you want to use the Mac most of the time but boot into Windows (or use Parallels) only occasionally while you "transition" over.

I would do 3/4 Mac, 1/4 Windows. Keep all your media files on the Mac side and get a program like MacDrive [ www.mediafour.com ] to read the Mac Partition. OS X has limited (read) support for NTFS on Windows so it's easier to get Windows to deal with the Mac than the other way around. There's also solutions like MacFuse/NTFS-3G on the Mac side but imho I'm not sure those are ready for prime-time.

SpinThis, why not simply using FAT32 on the Windows partition?

With FAT32 you can only have 32G dedicated to Windows.
I want to split mine 1/2 windows 1/2 Mac.

I set mine up with a small partition for each OS, then 2 fat32 partitions to store my media. This way both OS's can read/write to the files.
This has drawbacks as well, but it's the best system I could find.

Please explain with more detail.

Do your have 4 partitions in your internal hard drive?
How is your XP formatted?

Thanks,
Kenny Q

Yeah, 4 partitions.

1 - 15 GB OSX
2 - 5 GB TinyXP (NTFS)
3 - 32 GB Fat32
4 - 26(I think) GB Fat32

I can't remember the app I used to partition, but it was some free osx app I found.

FAT32 is a dinosaur and it sucks. Unless you stay under 8 GB in size, you're still wasting a fair amount of disk space due to filesytem bloat since the cluster size is huge (eg on a 32 GB partition your cluster size is 16K vs 4K on NTFS).

Some of the benchmarks in OS X put read/write of FAT32 up to 3 times slower. I'm not sure off the top of my head how much it slows down Windows but even M$ changed over to NTFS years ago... Try MacDrive and see if you like it. At least this way you'll be using two modern filesystems and not wasting space. (It'd be like carrying around a crate that holds 100 recoreds but you're only putting in 20.)

If you are doing a Nuke and Pave (wipe drive and start from Scratch) the Disk Utility (on Install CD) can set up multiple partitions.

is anyone having any troubles with serato on the new operating system Leopard??

I'm going to try NTFS. I don't think I need MacDrive (Yet) because I don't need to acces any Mac files on Windows.

I hate to piss off any Mac owners but I'm not feeling this Mac sh*t.

- Kenny Q

I'm going run Scratch Live from my Mac but the computer's music files will be in NTFS.

I'm hoping that it wouldn't be a problem.

You wont be able to make any changes to any files while using SSL from Mac - OSX can not write to NTFS.

Oh and BTW, there is no 32GB limit for FAT32.

What changes will I need to make while using SSL.

Adding Cue points?

Adding cue points.

Adding/Revming tracks to crates.

Adding crates.

Basically anything library wise. Even which columns you want to see etc. Column order. Sort order.

This doesn't look good.

You might as well run SSL in Windows if you do all your library work there anyway. Sounds like the best solution is to ebay your Mac, pick up a brand new Windows laptop and get on with your life. Running SSL on Mac reading a FAT32 disk is not recommended.

I dont think cluster size is really in an issue. Imagine you had 30.000 audio files, now 30.000 multiplied by 8k (average slack of a cluster) is less than 250MB, that is not much.



I am not debating that FAT32 should be your primary choice, in fact I would not use it either if I dont have to (data integrity reasons) but it is not as bad as you describe. My 2 cents.

250 MB on, what, a 32 GB disk? If you have a couple partitions, you're wasting almost a half gigabyte of space. For DJs storing lots of music, that only gets worse as your drive increases. If you had an external 250 GB drive, you would have almost 2 GB in wasted space just due to inefficiency. Last time I checked, hard drives are only getting bigger and this problem will get worse if people keep recommending FAT32 as a solution (not to mention the slow performance if you use it on Mac).

give it some time i was the same way when i bought my Macbook Pro but now i understand and love the mac os

30k audio files with about 6MB per file is already 175GB. So 250MB of 175GB that is about 0.5%. I dont think this is much.


No. 250MB is for 30,000 files, regardless of how many partitions you use.


No. An average file audio filesize of 6MB means that you could store about 50,166 audio files, so the wasted space would be 391MByte. That is not much. That is not even the space a recorded set of a night would take in mp3 format ;) (Yes, depends on the night of course ;) )

Consider:

If you buy a hardrive which has an advertises size if 250GB, you actually get less than 245GByte (that is because hardrive manufacturer consider 250GB of 250,000,000,000 Bytes, instead of 268,435,456,000 Bytes which would be the correct equivilant of 250GByte.

Long talk, an overhead of 0.5% is not much IMHO. However, the argument still stands - FAT32 is not a very reliable filesystem. If I am not forced to use it, I would not use it.

Correction:


30k audio files with about 6MB per file is already 175GB. So 250MB of 175GB that is about 0.15%. I dont think this is much.

Correction:


Consider:

If you buy a hardrive which has an advertises size if 250GB, you actually get less than 245GByte (that is because hardrive manufacturer consider 250GB of 250,000,000,000 Bytes, instead of 268,435,456,000 Bytes which would be the correct equivalant of 250GByte, that is about 2.3% difference/"waste"/lost space.



Correction:


Long talk, an overhead of 0.15% is not much IMHO. However, the argument still stands - FAT32 is not a very reliable filesystem. If I am not forced to use it, I would not use it.

In my view, wasted space is wasted space, period... especially if it's easily preventable in the first place. (You're starting to sound like the US military... "yeh that's an acceptable loss").

haha, Honestly... 2 or 3 Gigs of my harddisk space... HD space is so cheap nowaydays I really dont care.

LOL Billy came in the door hating on Macs BIG TIME from what I remember. You stuck out in my mind because I thought who is this fucking n00b coming in hating so strong.



That was what - a few months ago?

Amazing. LOL.

i have mine setup like this.
32gb win
150gb osx
i just keep all my files on the mac side, and i have macdrive on the windows side. this way i can edit audio, mp3's etc.from the widows side if i want. my itunes on both sides point to my music library on the mac side.

pulling out the archives... i was pissed i kept gettin dropouts then i realized if used the other port i was good. Then i just started gettin used to mac....still priced to high though....