Use of external Drive

I have a 250 GB OWC Mercury Elite Pro drive that I want to use exclusively to store and play a large amount of music files as a standalone system. I am looking for the simplest and cheapest way to do this. Mac laptops are too expensive for this purpose. One option is a simple PC with MacDrive. Any suggestions? I have installed Mavericks on this drive if that should be of any help.

Are you telling us you have installed Mavericks on your PC?

I was not very clear. The simple description is that I have the OWC drive formatted for Mac on which I want to store music files. I want a simple method to connect this to some playback system (stereo or whatever) without buying an expensive laptop.

The Mavericks installation is on the OWC drive, not on a PC.

Still not clear. You have music files on a drive. You want to attach them to a low-cost machine (like a cheap PC) for playback. So far, that's all fine.

The drive you have the music files on is formatted for Mac, as I understand it. If you have access to a Mac, you can move the files to a PC-formatted drive relatively easily. If not, then yes, you'll need a program that can read Mac-formatted drives so you can copy the music files over, erase the drive and format it for PC, then move the music files back.

I think what you're really looking for here is a NAS drive, so that your music library is available to whatever device you might want to send the music to -- HDTV, audio system, PC, whatever.

beadydee said:

The Mavericks installation is on the OWC drive, not on a PC.

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Just wanted to mention. Unless this external OWC drive needs to be bootable…you don't need an OS installed on it (Mavericks).

- Nick

Thanks for your time and comments. I've decided to simply get a wireless digital music system and work through AirPlay.

Good idea!