Best Hard Drive Format...Switched From PC To Mac

[Jayrcee]

I just switched from a PC to a Mac and am in the process of moving all
of my systems files over to my Mac's internal hard drive (presently
formated in the default Mac OS Extended (Journaled)). I would like to
stay within the Mac "ecosystem" from here on out. I would like to to
know what file format I should use for my new WD 2tb external hard
drive that I plan on copying my music collection over to? It's
doubtful I will be working in a Windows environment anymore. I need it
to be compatible with Logitech Media Server and my Squeezebox Boom. On
my PC I had my music scattered over 3 NTFS formatted internal hard
drives and I want to consolidate it all on the new 2tb external.
Thanks in advance!

[gharris999]

Post by Jayrcee
I just switched from a PC to a Mac and am in the process of moving all
of my systems files over to my Mac's internal hard drive (presently
formated in the default Mac OS Extended (Journaled)). I would like to
stay within the Mac "ecosystem" from here on out. I would like to to
know what file format I should use for my new WD 2tb external hard
drive that I plan on copying my music collection over to? It's
doubtful I will be working in a Windows environment anymore. I need it
to be compatible with Logitech Media Server and my Squeezebox Boom. On
my PC I had my music scatteredy over 3 NTFS formatted internal hard
drives and I want to consolidate it all on the new 2tb external.
Thanks in advance!

FLAC is still best for Squeezeboxes, no matter what OS is on the
server. As far as I can tell the support for FLAC in the Mac ecosystem
is more limited than it is in Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if die
hard Mac fanbois advise you to go with alec...Apple's proprietary
lossless format. At least Apple has released encoder and decoder
source code now. But that format is far from being anything that can
be considered open source. Anyway, the only objection that's likely to
be raised about alec is the fact that the squeezebox supports that
format only via server side transcoding. If you're ok with that, then
go with alec.

[Jayrcee]

Thanks for the response!
My music is already in FLAC format. I need to know what file format
the hard drive should be formatted to :)

[gharris999]

Rereading your post, I'm wondering if you're asking about disc file
system rather than audio file format. If that's the case, go with Mac
Extended. If this disc will hold mostly just your audio library, you
can probably do without the journaling.

[Jeff Flowerday]

exFat that way it works on Window and Mac.

[Nikhil]

There's quite a lot of options for Mac users:

1) The default HFS+(J) is probably the simplest. If you are working in
an all Mac environment, this should be fine. If you need cross platform
support, most linux distros allow you to access this as read only and
you can download a 'free read/write linux HFS+ driver from Paragon'
(http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-linux-per/). For Windows
access to HFS+ drives you can use the 'MacDrive commercial drivers from
MediaFour' (http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive) or 'Paragon'
(http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/).

2) Plain old FAT32 is aging but will work out of the box with almost
any OS including directly with a SqueezeBox Touch. The main limitation
is the 4GB individual file size, which might be a problem if you intend
to store video files on the same drive as well, but for audio files
only, it should not be a problem.

3) You can stick with NTFS and use either a 'free open source Mac read
write driver like NTFS-3G'
(http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/) or commercial
versions from 'Tuxera'
(http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/) or 'Paragon'
(http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/). NTFS has relatively
robust cross platform support either out of the box or through open
source drivers, including native access by the SqueezeBox touch.

4) As stated above exFAT from Microsoft is another option. It is
similar to FAT32 but removes the 4GB file size restriction. It
supported by most recent releases of Windows (I think Win 7 and above,
but can be added to XP and Vista as a free download) and MacOS (I think
OS 10.6 and above). There is also a FUSE read/write driver for linux,
and because this format is the official format for SDXC flash cards, we
are likely to see a lot more support in the future.

5) Finally if you would like to protect your data well, you might want
to consider ZFS. A commercial mac version from 'Ten's Complement'
(http://tenscomplement.com/) called 'Zevo Silver Edition'
(http://tenscomplement.com/our-products/zevo-silver-edition) recently
became available and there's also an 'open source version'
(http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/).

[Jayrcee]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions! After a little research, HFS+
seems the most practical for me, however ZFS has me intrigued :) I
forgot to mention that in the near future, I plan on ripping my Blu-ray
collection to hard drives as well. They would be placed together with
the new music drive in an Atom based media server of sorts.

[Eric Seaberg]

Keep it HFS+. Keeping everything as FLAC, you won't have a native Mac
app that can see them, except for Max. http://sbooth.org/Max/ It's a
GREAT APP that can rip, convert, tag, etc., any file type you may
encounter on the Mac. I use it to rip all CDs to FLAC, then transcode
to AAC so iTunes can import them to my iPhone.

Please feel free to email me offline if you need some help. DON'T BE
AFRAID of MAC OS. It's very simple and intuitive once you've gotten
past the Windows way of looking at things.

[brillo]

Another vote for HFS+ (which is the same thing as HFS+)...