Buying a 17" MBP - Need advice with external HDD

Ricku

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Hi Guys, I'm going to be buying a 17" MBP.

320GB just doesn't cut it for all the music and movies I have. I plan on installing bootcamp so that I can dual boot to play games and whatnot.

I'm going to buy an external HDD to put my music and movies on so that I can gain access to them whether I'm in OSX or XP.
Does it matter what format the HDD drive is in or will I be able to throw mp3s and mkvs etc on in and it will be read in both Operating Systems?

Thanks for reading,
Incrediboy
 
you'll need to format the external drive to fat32 or ntfs so the windows side can read the drive. OSX can read it regardless but windows can't read the mac partition.
 
you'll need to format the external drive to fat32 or ntfs so the windows side can read the drive. OSX can read it regardless but windows can't read the mac partition.

OSX can also write NTFS with either the free NTFS via MacFUSE driver or the paid paragon NTFS driver.
 
Hi Guys, I'm going to be buying a 17" MBP.

320GB just doesn't cut it for all the music and movies I have. I plan on installing bootcamp so that I can dual boot to play games and whatnot.

I'm going to buy an external HDD to put my music and movies on so that I can gain access to them whether I'm in OSX or XP.
Does it matter what format the HDD drive is in or will I be able to throw mp3s and mkvs etc on in and it will be read in both Operating Systems?

Thanks for reading,
Incrediboy

Is the 17" powerful enough to run games in Windows under Parallels/Fusion, that way you don't need to worry about the NTFS formatting!

Out of interest why go for a 17" MBP and then tether it to a desk with external HDDs?
 
Is the 17" powerful enough to run games in Windows under Parallels/Fusion, that way you don't need to worry about the NTFS formatting!

Out of interest why go for a 17" MBP and then tether it to a desk with external HDDs?

the 17" isn't any more powerful than the 15" really - slightly faster processor is about it, but its driving a much larger screen resolution, so it may end up slower for games.

and parallels isn't great for games. Way, *way* better than my old macbook, so stuff like world of goo is playable, but I wouldn't play crysis on it... You can have a pretty compact windows install anyway.


Have you thought about a network drive, or USB drive attached to a time capsule if you have one? a physical HDD attached for media may get annoying after a while if you have to connect it every time you want to listen to some music.
 
Ooooh i had this issue too..... it was a pain in the arse

I ended up picking up an old G3 for a few quid, installing os x on it, and installing a firewire card.... I then plugged in my external hd, put the music it itunes and shared it from their....

Now i do the same thing from my photography mac (mac pro) on a second internal HD, and now i share the music to my laptop from that and my Xbox 360....

I would seriously consider not getting a 17 inch one, they are a pain to carry, and bend a little in the middle which always concerned me, the screen also go a bit funny at the edges sometimes.
 
Hi guys, thanks for the response.

As I am a university student I need the portability of the MBP to take in to uni. I'm doing a graphic design/advertising degree so I also want the extra inches on the screen for photoshop and whatnot.

As for lugging it around I don't really mind. Some people find taking a 15" a bit of an effort at times, but then again they can also be about 5ft11. I'm working on the scaling idea. I'm a 6ft3 rugby player so a 17" laptop isnt really an effort for me to carry :)

I don't see how a HDD is tethering it to a desk. I plan on it being USB powered and if I have a laptop bag it's not much effort just to slip in a small HDD.
 
Hi guys, thanks for the response.

As I am a university student I need the portability of the MBP to take in to uni. I'm doing a graphic design/advertising degree so I also want the extra inches on the screen for photoshop and whatnot.

As for lugging it around I don't really mind. Some people find taking a 15" a bit of an effort at times, but then again they can also be about 5ft11. I'm working on the scaling idea. I'm a 6ft3 rugby player so a 17" laptop isnt really an effort for me to carry :)

I don't see how a HDD is tethering it to a desk. I plan on it being USB powered and if I have a laptop bag it's not much effort just to slip in a small HDD.

You can get FireWire 800 portable drives, I've got a LaCie rugged with FW800 for really speedy data transfers.
 
I'd recommend using/installing MacDrive in Windows
Mediafour | MacDrive
This will allow you to Read/Write to your Mac formatted drives. Its what I use myself and it works well - its so handy to be able to access a needed file from my Macintosh HD when i have booted into Windows on my MacBook :thumbsup:
 

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