External Hard drive

Hi everyone,

I'm still a PC user, and plan on buying an iMac pretty soon. Also, I'm getting a LaCie external drive, (d2, 400GB, triple interface).

What I want to do is this: I want to eventually transfer all of my data from the PC to the new iMac. What would be the best way to do this, other than burning an endless amount of CDs? I have 300GB+ of data. I wanted to connect the LaCie HD to my current PC (since I'm running out of HD space) and put everything on it. After I get my iMac, I thought I'd just connect the HD to it... but then I remembered that the filesystems would clash, or I should say, the Mac will not read NTFS. Someone suggested I could have the drive formatted as FAT, but FAT doesn't support large file sizes! So I'm kind of stuck here... I don't know how I could do this efficiently.

My last resort would be networking the iMac and PC, but to be honest, I have never networked two computers... I don't even know what kind of cables I would need or anything. Maybe a serial cable? That's all I know. :biohazard

Sorry about the long post! I hope you can provide some ideas for me. Any/all suggestions are welcome. Thanks a bunch!

- vr04

Mac's can read NTFS they just can't write to NTFS

trpnmonkey41 said:

Mac's can read NTFS they just can't write to NTFS

Click to expand...

Thanks for your suggestion monkey. I'm gonna answer my own question here for anyone who needs it.

Here 's what I'm gonna do. (Click on "Sharing files between a Mac laptop and a PC connected with a crossover cable"). I can transfer all of my files from the PC to Mac through a simple ethernet cable. I didn't know that was possible, and it looks easy enough. I just hope that method won't take too long of a time to transfer all of my stuff.

- vr04

Ok, first off, I am not extremely knowledgable on cables and such, but I just thought I'd warn you first about my experience. My brother and I both have Powerbooks. On mine, I have 30GB of music on iTunes. We were wanting to copy all the songs onto his Powerbook. So we buy the crossover cable, and just testing it out we dragged over ONE folder [contained only EIGHT songs], this took about 4-5 minutes to complete. After that, we stopped and thank goodness we didn't copy the whole iTunes library over [6000 songs, we would have been there for a year and a half].

And you mentioned you want to transfer over 300GB of files. Again, I don't know much about cables and copying data, but I can't imagine how long that would take if it works the same for you. But we weren't about to sit there for 30GB to transfer, let alone 300.

When we first got the Powerbooks, we did copy a few songs through Bluetooth, that took even longer obviously.

Good luck with whatever you do. Please let me know how it works out for you, or if you use a different method let me know, I'd really be interested in a better method for this. Good luck!

if you do it right the cross over cable should be perfect, i dont know what toyota did wrong but you should be looking at more like 5 seconds a song imo

TOYOTA said:

Ok, first off, I am not extremely knowledgable on cables and such, but I just thought I'd warn you first about my experience. My brother and I both have Powerbooks. On mine, I have 30GB of music on iTunes. We were wanting to copy all the songs onto his Powerbook. So we buy the crossover cable, and just testing it out we dragged over ONE folder [contained only EIGHT songs], this took about 4-5 minutes to complete. After that, we stopped and thank goodness we didn't copy the whole iTunes library over [6000 songs, we would have been there for a year and a half].

And you mentioned you want to transfer over 300GB of files. Again, I don't know much about cables and copying data, but I can't imagine how long that would take if it works the same for you. But we weren't about to sit there for 30GB to transfer, let alone 300.

When we first got the Powerbooks, we did copy a few songs through Bluetooth, that took even longer obviously.

Good luck with whatever you do. Please let me know how it works out for you, or if you use a different method let me know, I'd really be interested in a better method for this. Good luck!

Click to expand...

It shouldn't take that long, you might want to try it agian, make sure that you check all the settings on your computer and his (security and such), and that the cable isn't overly twisted wich can cause interfercen between the wire sets inside the cable.

I figured that was the case. I don't know what we did wrong. The cord connected the two computers and allowed for file transfer, so I don't know what would effect the speed...?

Could it be the specific type of cord? Are there different ones with different transfer speeds?

Well you don't need a crossover cable between the 2 powerbooks, because of the type of network card they both have.. I believe this only works on 15 inch and higher though.

They are 15" and 17". So how do you connect them through the network cards?

Thanks for your help.

you just plug them in, the will recongize each other... but if they are bothr unning mac osx I would recomend firewire. It is alotttt faster since you have both macs. the origional post was between a pc and a mac. If you have 2 macs I would use firewire because of the incredible speeds they are capable of. 300% faster then ethernet. To use firewire boot up one computer holding down the t key and it will start the computer in target disk mode and your hard drive will appear on the other computers desk top. It was as simple as that.

i always just used AIM to transfer files if both computers were conected...yea it took quite a while but it works

-chris

Thanks for all the replies. I had great success with the crossover cable. It did take a while, but I was able to transfer everything. 340GB in total. Phew!

All I did was follow the directions from the link that I posted, and it worked well.

- vr04