Best Way to Transfer Files from Windows to Mac

I am finally changing my HTPC set up from Windows to Mac and got a great deal on a 2012 Mac Mini. My current HTPC has 2 drives inside of it, the one runs the OS, programs, etc, and the other is purely storage for media. The one for storage is a 2TB drive. It has probably around 1.5TB worth of data on it. Obviously it is NTFS and I need to format it for Mac, but without losing my media of course. At some point I'm going to switch out my Airport Extreme router for a 2TB Time Capsule. Once I do that can I just hook up my old drive through an external case using Firewire right into the Time Capsule to transfer files? Or would I have to route things through the Mac Mini some way? Also until I have my Time Capsule I should be able to read everything from the drive through Firewire right? From what I know you can read from NTFS but just not write to it. Thanks for all the help!

You can hook up an external drive but you'll have to use a USB case. Unless something has changed that I'm not aware of the Time Capsule does not support Firewire connections. If you're going to format the drive you're going to have to move the data to another drive, format the external, then move things back. That will involve using the computer as the "middleman" but you can do other things while the process is going on.

Pushing that much data around twice will be a bit time consuming. Try leaving the drive formatted as NTFS and attach it to the Time Capsule. I'm pretty sure it will be recognized. If I remember correctly you should be able to write to it as well when it's connected to the Time Capsule.

If read performance is OK but you can't write to it then This driver should take care of that.

Awesome! Thanks a lot, Slydude.

Yeah, it sounds like just waiting til I have the Time Capsule to transfer things over is the best solution. But in the mean time that looks like a great interim solution from Paragon. I've used their software before for other things and it's good stuff. That program will make it super easy to use the drive as an external drive via Firewire on the Mac Mini until I get the Time Capsule. Great suggestion, thanks again.

Glad to help. I've done a little more poking around and found that drives connected to the Time Capsule have to be either Mac OS Extended journaled, FAT32, or FAT16. So it looks like plugging the NTFS drive into the Time Capsule will require a reformat after all.

I've read somewhere that the Paragon driver works for NTFS drives directly connected to the Mac but not when they are connected via Time Capsule. Might be worth an e-mail to them to confirm that. I've seen suggestions that other routers will permit the Mac to read and write to NTFS drives that are attached but I'm still checking that out.

The Paragon software worked great. For now I just directly connected the drive and the software worked like a charm.

After talking to a buddy of mine I think I'm going to go with a NAS setup independent of a Time Capsule and just keep my Airport Extreme. I guess by extension would a NTFS need reformatted when it's NAS storage? I imagine it's probably best. Or would the Paragon software work just the same when accessing a network drive vs a locally connected one?

I found that there is Migration Assistant on Mac. But it looks like it's aimed at porting Windows user accounts. In theory could this be used to transfer files from the old NTFS drive over to the new Mac formatted 2TB drive? Also could you answer some of my questions above that if it's attached to NAS does it matter what format the drive is in?

Sorry. Somehow I missed the other post about using a NAS instead of the Time Capsule. I think what you are wanting to do with some, though perhaps not all of these devices. I think some of these devices will accept NTFS drives attached to them and others won't. Best bet is to find one that you like and then contact their support department for an answer to that question.

Transferring he files from an NTFS drive to a Mac drive should work fine. A few users have had Migration Assistant crash the first time they attempted the transfer. Repeating the transfer usually took care of the problem.