One of the daily hassles of using Apple Macintosh computers is the incompatibilities that arise with the broad Microsoft Windows world. Individual files often require conversion, but what about whole disks? Apple has long supported the universal and simplistic FAT filesystem, and added read-only support for NTFS back in 2003 in OS X 10.3 “Panther”. Third-party software like Paragon’s NTFS or the free NTFS-3G driver enabled read/write support, but a native solution was more desirable. Although 10.6 “Snow Leopard” includes NTFS write support, it is disabled by default. In this post, I’ll discuss methods for activating this native NTFS write support, as well as the pros and cons of doing so!
Windows
Taming Monster Disk Drives: 3 TB and Beyond!
Seagate, Western Digital, and others are introducing massive new 3 TB hard disk drives, but will they work with current computers? In order to take advantage of new hard disk drives over 2 TB, you must have a compatible operating system, BIOS, partition table, and file system.
Versioning FAIL: Windows Vista/7 Robocopy
Last week I posted the excellent news that the Robocopy in new versions of Microsoft Windows is multi-threaded and thus much (much!) faster. Then I tried to actually use it on a Windows Vista machine. Redmond, we have a problem. It turns out that only the “6.1” versions of Microsoft Windows (Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2) include multi-threaded robocopy.
Robocopy: Better, Faster, Stronger
Robocopy is the best tool to move data between NTFS filesystems but was never very quick. Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and later versions include a new version of Robocopy with performance tweaks including multi-threading that speed things up dramatically.
Dustin Pedroia And I Have Two Things In Common!
The news just came in from Redmond: I’m a Microsoft MVP again for 2009! I felt great last year, when I received the award for the first time, but this is even better since I now really understand what it’s all about and how I can use it to help the enterprise storage community!
