For external hard drives, a dock for swapping versus enclosures
I am looking for the best & most economical set up; & on another forum someone suggested using a dock for hard drives, & use it with my bare hard drives, as opposed to getting seperate enclosures for each one.
which is better? some things to consider for my situation is that I am in an older home with dirt & dust, I do dust, but it is around. Also, is it safe to be handling bare drives & swapping them in & out. For the most part, I do not have my drives on all the time, but for maybe 2-5 hours at a time, & usually just use one at a time, & occasionally having 2 on to transfer files between them. the dock appeals as I have limited ports on my macbook pro, & I would prefer to have my external hard drives connected directly to my mac. that brings up another thing, I have heard people "daisy chain" their firewire hard drives together to use with their apple laptops. |
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I do run windows on my macbook pro via paralells desktop 5.0, & would use my external hard drive with windows, will windows recognize or work with an external hard drive hooked up to my mac via firewire 400 or 800?
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Parallels is an emulation layer for hard drives, so the hardware connectivity does not come into play. Windows will see anything the Mac does. You'll actually just want to simply share the drives as network drives. It's quite easy. If I'm not mistaken, Parallels auto loads Mac drives as network drives in Windows already. Just read the instructions -- it's all there.
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My two cents...
Do you plan on moving your drives between separate Windows PCs and Macs? If so, you may want to format your external drives as exFAT. exFAT is a fairly newer file system from Microsoft and it can be used natively by OSX 10.6.5 or newer (no special programs or drivers needed).
I use that setup myself and it has made life much simpler. The only significant downside is if you also have a Linux system (I do) because there are no proper Linux drivers for exFAT. If you only use your Mac and run Windows through Parallels this should be a moot point. |
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The only issue I've run into is that Linux doesn't support exFAT yet. There are some work-arounds, but they seem to be just as iffy as using third party file system drivers for HFS in Windows.
Let me know how it works for you. I am just learning by experience with it for now. |
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