Advice on mac book

magicaxeman

magicaxeman

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I currently run a windows set up and am looking at switching to a mac, most likely a mac book pro.

My current system including win 7 64, all my programs such as CS5.5, documents, pro tools etc totals over 500gb

Will I find that I need much less space on the mac? or is it much the same, I should add that I would most likely switch to aperture and would remove garage band completely from the mac.

The other issue is I use a buffalo NAS drive to host my itunes library which itself is well in excess of 50ogb, I obviously need to be able to access that drive to transfer the files before reformatting it for osx, will I be able to do that from the mac? as I know my windows machine wont see an osx drive.
I cant rely on downloading from icloud as the majority of my books and films have been purchased from other retailers then added to itunes which acts as my media server for my tv, laptop and streaming hifi.

Both my back up drives are seagate 1tb and both formatted for windows as well.

I figured mac would be the way to go as I don't like the specs on a lot of the newer windows machines (i7 processors that are actually slower than my current i5) and of course having to run win 8.

Thanks
 
you wont need to change/format the NAS, it most likely uses EXT3 file system and at least SMB for sharing. it may even have built in AFP.

re processors - i7 in a QM suffix will be faster than an i5.
 
Thanks Neil, on checking with buffalo my 420 linkstation would need re formatting and would lose its itunes server functionality and only be usable as an external hard drive so it looks like I'll have to stick to windows for now.
 
having a quick scan of the manual SMB should be enabled by default and you should have the option to enable AFP with a tickbox. under advanced settings (page 15) and/or under the share settings (page 19).

http://cdn.cloudfiles.mosso.com/c85091/LS400SeriesManual.pdf

(although you dont even need to do that, mac will work fine with SMB)

no need to format. it would be the only NAS ive ever seen that would not be cross platform otherwise.
 
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Thanks Neil I'm sure it will see the files now but It says on the spec page for the NAS :

*The HDD default format is NTFS; to work with Mac, reformat the HDD using Mac Disk Utility.

†Only basic external hard drive functionality is supported with this operating system; some included utilities may not work.

I take this to mean what it literally says, ie it will only work as an external hard drive and no itunes server running on it, maybe those notes are refering to using it as a back up drive? I'll give buffalo a shout tomorrow but I've now started to look at another Sony Vaio i7, 16gb ram,1tb storage.
 
neil_g said:
Our windows servers at work all run ntfs drives but work fine for mac over smb and AFP.
Click to expand...

Like you say, it should work. But Buffalo have a bad history with Macs. Some of their Terrastations broke with OS X a couple of releases back and they have never been inclined to fix it. Later ones seem to have compatibility issues (just what I read on the 'net - I'll never buy their kit again). It may be more logical to blame Apple but I'd actually be wary of using a Buffalo with OS X - especially if they start talking about limited capabilities.

Honestly, I'd explore the costs of replacing the drive with something from QNAP or Synology.
 
Hi,
Mac can read & write to NTFS so file exchange shouldn't be a problem, not sure about other NAS features... I use external NTFS drives on mac without any issues. I've got somewhere an article how to do this, it takes less than 2 minutes. No special apps or anything like this.
 
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