Formatting External Raid to work with Mac and PC

Hi,

I just added an external Raid docking station using the eSATA Extender Cable from OWC. I want to be able to share my video files with people who are using Premiere Pro on a PC.

How do I format the new RAID drive for best performance for both Mac and PC? There are a lot of options in the Disc Utility formatting pane. I need help with formatting the new RAID drive for optimal performance on both a Mac (using Final Cut editor) and PC (using Premiere Pro editor)

Can someone please walk me through the settings? For example, do I choose MS-DOS FAT for format and "Mirrored Raid" for RAID type? And what should the RAID Block size be for video, etc.

Thanks for your help.

Shelley

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

You can try using exFAT, which works on Mac OS 10.6.5 onwards, as well as PCs. FAT32 has a 4 gig file limit, so that's bad for video use. However, I would advise formatting your media drive as OS X Extended, and use the exFAT drive only for transport.



www.strypesinpost.com

You also can use NTFS formatting, though it requires an additional driver on your Mac - for example Paragon.

MS-DOS FAT is the worst format you can use as it is very slow handling a lot of files.

-Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

There's also MacDrive, which would allow a PC to read Mac-formatted drives. Don't know about editing with it on Premiere, though; I used it to transcode Phantom cam footage which was to be edited on FCP. I suppose you could also use it only for copying files.


www.derekmok.com

I'm not sure about performance when using NTFS or MacDrive when you're working cross platform. This one layer of translation will slow down the throughput on the drive, and how fast the translation occurs depends on the software. I remember using an old version of MacFuse, and it was very slow because it was single threaded.

exFAT would be a natively supported on both platforms, except that exFAT was designed for flash drives, so performance is also an issue, along with drive fragmentation.

Best to use them only for transportation between workstations.



www.strypesinpost.com