So …I recently moved all my production over to MAC OSX literally like 4 months ago… I did this for two reasons: Stability and to hop on the bandwagon
When I unboxed my pretty G5 and hooked up my External Hardddrive I noticed some apple trickery
YOU CANNOT WRITE TO NFTS!
I think Im pretty Techo-Saavy so I did my research as all of us nerds do. I found NTFS-3g installed it and I was on my way with full read and write accsess, But then I noticed something terrible again. The write and Read time made me want to shoot myself. Songs took longer to load , Sample Folders took forever to load so I pretty much stopped writing tunes as much as I normally do. Discouraged I thought to myself I have to do something quick about this as I had to halt sessions with a new project Im working on. My first thought was Buy another Harddrive from the macstore and transfer data from the old one then sell tit. Then tradgedy happened folders started literally disappearing…I was pissed, I couldnt believe this was happening. I could not find any help with this situation and virtually no Idea what top do…A couple weeks ago I got a good Idea to plug it into a windows coputer to see If I can get to the files that way. Sure enough that worked so I started creating new folders on the windows drive and then placing the stuff that was invisible on the mac into them. That worked! I was so happy I unistalled NTFS-3g and threw a get together at my house with a couple friends(who fed me pros about macs for years) At this party one of my freinds recommended Paragon Software’s NTFS stating he used it awhile back then unistalled it cause he got a time capsule. I went home installed it and VIOLA! Full read and write access a blazingly fast speeds. This was like last friday. No problems everything was cool…Im making songs agian. I take my harddrive with me to my gf’s so I can make music with her if needs be …(My girl can make a sick beat btw lol) I plug it up to her PC running XP and OH SHIT another problem, This time it says my drive is corrupted and cannot be read. I think no prob its probably just the new software only lets the drive work on the mac. I come home yesterday and plug it in…NOTHING…It wasnt completly fubared I could still access my song files and all of my mp3-s but ALL and I mean all of samples were not accessable. I let the drive run though a Disk recovery app all last night …Still no go. At that point I said forget it… I transferred all of my song files and mp3’s straight to my internal HD then formatted the hardrive to OSX native format almost about to cry…I have been accumalting those samples for a loooong time. Some of them were priceless like those “THESE ARE SAMPLES FROM MY PRIVATE STASH , AND I WILL KNOW IF YOU LEAK THEM” samples from proiducers that shall remain nameless. Samples that I bought and samples from now defunct forums. Im hella sad right now… I called everybody I know and told them to donate some sounds to my great hardddrive crash of 2009 fund. If anyone can feel my pain whether this has happened to you or not. Please feel free to donate a coulple sounds anything will help Im also trying to rebuild some stuff (Thank god for audionews)myself…
Here is some things I wish I had read before installing PARAGON NTFS
sheeeesh… so you switched from a windows platform to a mac in order to gain stability and ended up with data corruption and problems over problems.
a friend of mine recently got a mac book pro, since it’s so hip to have this overpriced hardware and of course everything is way better than it is on windows PC etc etc…
you can’t imagine how unhappy he is right now, because he just realized how little of the desirable software i am using here is available for his mac.
it feels so crippled… and everytime this happens i wonder “WHY?” … i stopped asking him, because i feel he meanwhile also regrets his decision.
i mean… there certainly are a couple of reasons for why a mac is cool… but stability isn’t one of them and even though i’m praying and preaching this since years, here it goes again:
if a windows PC isn’t stable, it’s for 99% of the time the guy sitting in front of it that causes the issues. a malconfigured PC, be it hardare or software-wise, cannot perform well and stable.
i know it’s still trendy bashing microsoft and jokes about bill are everyone’s joy… but actually, the whole thing is a cliché build up from emotional leftovers and problems of the time prior to NT-Kernel based windows OS.
now that might sound like a MS-fanboy’s writing, but in my world, changes have to make sense in terms of improvement or any other gain of whatever kind… and especially when from a computer-musicians point of view, i simply don’t get it… unless you’re hooked on logic, but i guess that’s not the case.
Take this advise:
Don’t ever use drivers on *ix-based systems that allow write access to NTFS partitions.
Read is okay. This is how i solve transfer problems between the two systems:
I have an NTFS partition on my external harddrive, a Linux Ext. partition and a FAT file system.
Ofcourse, only 2GB, for the FAT partition but exchanging through FAT is a lot safer than letting your mac / linux or unix system perform write access to your NTFS partitions.
If you need something to use from your NTFS partition, you can save it to your native or FAT partition and specially when saving stuff to FAT, you can always read it out on somebody else’s Windows platform.
Thanks man…Seriously Im not mad…I actually am a die-hard windows user but my PC was getting old and it was large. My overall goal is to perform live(yes with a imac, dont hate lol ) But seriously there are pros and cons to both OSes so you cant really validate what you are saying(keith303). Windows vs. MAC is like speaking religion It just so happens you are speaking to a cat that enjoys both of them for certain things they do. As far as why I switched is mainly due to me shaking things up on the way I do music…Hence the big switch from Reason to Renoise… It is what it is! Obviously it was meant for this to happen as my sample file management was horrible and totally a mess.
NTFS is a proprietary Microsoft filesystem. Unlicensed samba/wine style hacks are possible, but they are risky.
A Mac would need to be aware of the NT filesystem and permissions structure in order to effecitvely read and write to the disk. That is not easy to do, as how would a Mac predict both NT Workstation and Domain permissions when it is not “active”?
The icing on the cake here is that MS has a history of deliberately changing products to make them inoperable with other systems, proven in a court of law as part of their monopoly practices many years ago.
So yeah, you’re fucked. Sorry.
I’m not saying mac is better. The grievances are fair. It might be 99% of the time it’s the users fault. But for me, 100% of the time I sit down at a windows computer, it’s NOT UNIX.
In one way i am with you, on the other hand, Windows was aimed towards folks who never worked with a computer and it should work out of the box without problems.
Windows always had major security issues and the dumb-fuck computer user was never teached to be secure at that time.
We know today we should use firewalls and anti-virus material and anti spam programs to stop a lot of shit.
I must say the past year, the amount of spam coming into my mailboxes dimmed down very drastically.
But yeah, OSX is no more stable than any other clunk of hardware that contains DIMMs, an Intel processor and a harddrive.
Yet today i have a good set of tools that allows me to access NTFS and FAT / FAT32 partitions if any shit has happened, while with linux, you should only hope that FSCK can fix anything that it requires to fix before you get back read access.
There might be some tools that allow you to fix a Linux HDD, yet if there are, most likely might also require you to know your root password.
Haha, yeah I know. But this is flamewar territory.
I have very good reasons to choose mac. I feel it’s a good compromise for what I want. (Integrated design + unix + free time not building my computer as if it was still 1991 = money I’m willing to spend) I never chose mac before it was OS X. As far as I care, before OS X, macs sucked.
I understand people’s frustrations against the platform. I believe a lot of it stems from unfounded pride, on both sides of the camp. And there’s always the Linux camp, too!
Wait, it’s a new macbook pro? i.e. an Intel based computer? Why not read a bit about bootcamp or parallels and help your friend out? Overpriced or not, the hardware on that laptop is pretty good. A lot of Microsoft employees use them (see songsmith promotional video, for example, the little girls computer is a macbook)
yeh keep your ntfs drive inside the windows box, hook them both up to a router and or transfer through the firewire link or ethernet sharing protocol, quick and not so deadly.
with apples, just focus on what you can do that only apples can do, or that apples can do best, and you will be happiest with it. in this case don’t allow a commercial third-party driver access to your ntfs partition.
oh yeh, and go to the arstechnica open forum and scour through the pages or post a question and see if there is a way to repair your corrupted drive. and if not the users there should know about it, they have much strength.
i totally agree that there are pro’s and con’s on both OS’s sides. and i’m certainly not trying to say windows is better than OSX or the other way around - they’re both just operating systems which can do their job well. i just don’t see the point that if somebody has years of experience with one OS to make the switch when there is no real gain. and as much as i couldn’t validate my points, you couldn’t validate a really factual reason for the switch either, because “stability” isn’t really appropriate if you ask me, because if it was, i should be fighting BSOD’s on a regular basis, which i don’t. they don’t even happen sporadically, even though my hardware is being tortured by higher voltages and clocks 24/7.
the ideological reason you mentioned is however totally comprehensible - even for me
you sometimes just need a change to get over certain habits - and if the OS switch helps and strengthens you in doing that, it’s certainly a good thing!
so i didn’t intend to denounce your new OS / hardware. i was rather questioning your decision to switch as i sometimes have the impression that people purchase apple stuff just because they’re told they were “the best” or “most reliable” or because it’s some sort of status symbol.
from my point of view, as a “computer musician” that isn’t looking into using logic, there are only disadvantages:
the hardware is more pricey than a wintel PC with equal peformance
the hardware (mothboard/bios) offers less possiblities for user alterations (over-/underclocking/-volting)
the software offering and its variety is rather meager compared to that for windows based PCs. (speaking of VST plugins for example)
the whole concept of an apple computer reminds more of a console than a highly configurable and individually configurable PC. “computers for girls” !
the only two advantages i can think of is possibly the fact that viruses and other malicious software gimmicks aren’t as likely there than they are on the other side and well… that the OS looks prettier - if that is an advantage anyway.
ok… guess i’m finished - hope i didn’t highjack your thread now!?
oh and all the best for your new approach to music creation - hope it works out as expected
he’s already using parallells… the funny thing is that he’s almost using it more than he’s using the actual OS.
and yes, the hardware is quite okay (core2duo 2.2ghz, 2gb ram, 120gb hd), but he could’ve had the same stuff for almost half the price, which means he could’ve saved roughly 1.000 EUR. but unfortunately he decided for the purchase in a time where we didn’t have any contact to each other… hehe
that’s corrrect i guess… but doesn’t that also apply to OSX? i think it does in an even higher degree, since apple tries to lure the total computer noob and the windows-frustrated user into buying their products.
Got myself HDD recently. Formatted it to Linux native file system at instant. If I really need to use it with windows at some moment in time, installing EXT2 drivers for windows is seriously simpler and more secure than using NTFS with any other operating system but windows.
Maybe this whole conversation might be a little out of my league, but I’m still curious. I run XP and I have an external HD that I’ve formatted in windows (so I’m guessing it’s formatted NTFS). Last week I went over to a friend’s house and hooked it up to his macbook to exchange samples. We didn’t experience any problems like that.
That’s what’s kind of confusing me about this thread.
It partially depends on how the harddrive is being used.
On Windows you can have local computer rights, but your can also have rights as a network domain user.
Even though the exact same name and password may be used, the domain user has a different SID key than the local user and both have different rights what they may do, this also relates to policy rules applied. Domain policies and local computer policies are both not the same.
Once you are logged on as a domain user, some resources on your local computer may not be accessible anymore, like external usb sticks whereas this would be allowed if you would only log on as local user.
A hardrive that is not attached to it’s original domain or workstation won’t tell the NTFS driver which areas supposed to be accessible or not, you would need at least the windows registry for this to know.
But when the drive is NTFS formatted on a Mac only, i actually consider that a bullshit excuse since a Mac does not deal with authentication policies.
If you would exchange between Windows and Mac using an NTFS drive, your risks becomes higher because then policies are being applied and the Mac can mess up things.
imho, if your external drive was NTFS formatted on a mac using a commercial driver and it seems to mess up the partition without even having it hooked up to a Windows system, the company that created the driver also inserted a major mistake in their driver design, that is not something i would blame the NTFS structure for.
Im on PPC so there could be no paralells or boot camp …Not a problem… I just made a heavy tune which is the purpose in the first place. Like I always say “Work with what you have” or “If you are a producer , Produce.”
