Such a painful task.. A while ago, some lovely people wrote an NTFS Driver for Mac OS X that allows you to mount, read and write to NTFS drives natively. It’s great if you just need to transfer a few files off a drive. The problem begins when you’re transferring larger files, it’s painfully slow. Yes, emphasis on the word pain in case you missed it.
So, this afternoon I guess I found a solution to my problem. The only problem within my solution is that it requires Parallels Desktop or similar.
If you have said software installed, the solution is simple. Open up Parallels, go to the Virtual Machine configuration. From there click on Shared Folders, check Access Windows folders from Mac, then check Mount virtual disks to Mac OS X Desktop. That’s all there is to it.
From there, mount the external NTFS formatted drive from within Parallels and you’ll also see it appear on your Mac desktop. Then just simply drag the files over from your Mac OS X installation to the virtual drive. While it’s not the most ideal method and as tedious as this task is, it seems to yield much faster results.
If this method worked for you, leave a comment and let me know if the time taken to copy files over was any better.
Update: Then I found NTFS for Mac OS X by Paragon Software which has pretty much solved the problem altogether.
Filed in Mac
On Wednesday, a thought popped into my head: “You need to make use of the second Seagate 200Gb hard drive you have sitting in the garage doing nothing”. I have been looking around for one of these enclosures for quite some time now, but for the price most retailers had them listed, I chose to pass each time.
It was my lucky day, I found it on special for $149 with $17 shipping, so out came the credit card and that was that. The enclosure arrived this morning at work, so I painfully had to wait the day out to make use of it. What does the enclosure feature?
Capacity:
Two 3.5″ SATA I / SATA II Hard Drives.
Data Transfer:
FireWire 400: Up to 400Mb/s, FireWire 800: Up to 800Mb/s and USB 2.0: Up to 480Mb/s.
Operating Modes:
JBOD, Raid 0 or single drives.
Chipset:
Oxford 924DSB.
Setup was pretty simple and took probably 10 minutes at most. I have chosen to use the hard drives in Raid 0, striping mode. The enclosure is connected to my iMac using FireWire 800. The improved transfer speeds are definitely noticeable, I transferred over 59Gb of data in 17 minutes – which for me, is quite impressive.
The only minor issue I see if the fan at the rear of the enclosure, which does have a rather elevated ‘hum’ probably because it runs at 6000rpm or so. I’ll be looking at getting a quieter replacement in the coming days. In closing, if you are after a stylish, dual bay hard drive enclosure – don’t pass this one up.
1/10/10 more on the fan. Earlier in the year, I purchased a low rpm fan too keep the noise down, but this needed the connectors rewired. It ran its course, then the bearing started failing so recently, I removed it altogether. I now have two WD Green 1.5TB drives in the bay and there is really no issue with heat.
Filed in Mac
