Mac Reader Hardrive For Windows
With MacDrive 9 Standard, you can access, manage, and even create and format disk drives for Apple's Mac OS from inside Windows Explorer. Not just hard drives, but removable USB drives, too. MacDrive can repair damaged Mac disks, burn Mac-compatible CDs and DVDs, and do other things disk managers are supposed to do.
Pros
Peace: MacDrive's peace symbol icon emphasizes the software's mission: cross-platform peace and seamless interoperability between the Mac and Windows worlds.
MacDrive 10 Pro gives you the power of Mac RAID on your Windows PC. With MacDrive 10 Pro, you can access Apple formatted RAID disks as well as RAID sets created with SoftRAID. You can also securely delete files and folders from your disk and easily create ISO images and mount sparse images. Hard Drives SSD Rescue. Paragon Driver for macOS (10.10 and above) This driver provides write access for Seagate external drives in Mac OS without having to reformat. Be sure the drive is connected to the computer before starting the installation. Windows' default NTFS is read-only on OS X, not read-and-write, and Windows computers can't even read Mac-formatted HFS+ drives. FAT32 works for both OSes, but has a 4GB size limit per file, so it.
Create Mac disks: MacDrive can create, format, and modify drives in Mac OS Standard (HFS), Mac OS Extended (HFS+), and Mac OS Extended (case-sensitive; HFSX).
Advanced options: We could prevent changes to Mac disks, customize MacDrive's compatibility with earlier versions of Windows and Mac OS, and select files to view in dual-format hybrid CDs and DVDs.
Cons
Balky disk list: Mac-to-Windows interoperability can be a bit slow or balky at times. For instance, the MacDrive Disk Manager's drive list wouldn't or couldn't scroll until after we'd formatted a Mac drive.
Cheaper alternatives: If all you want to do is transfer files between a Mac and PC, cheaper and easier options aren't hard to find (Dropbox, for example).
Bottom Line
If you own or support both Windows and Mac machines, MacDrive 9 Standard can make your life much easier.
Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of MacDrive 9.3.1.1 Standard.
What do you need to know about free software?
Rakesh Shewale writes with a common question about formatting compatibility:
I bought a new external HDD for my mac about a month ago and formatted it to Mac OS X Extended Journaled. Now it has my all data. But the problem is I can’t access this HDD from my PC which has Windows and Linux.
The trouble is that the drive is already formatted—this limits options, but it’s neither expensive nor impossible to proceed. Paragon is a long-time developer of cross-platform Mac/Windows disk mounting software, and its HFS+ for Windows 10 works on Windows releases all the way back to XP and Windows Server 2003 all the way through the present Windows 10 release. It’s $20, but also has a 10-day trial. HFSExplorer for Windows is free and updated for Windows 10, but requires the installation of the Java 5 or later runtime environment (JRE), which can introduce security issues unless you configure it carefully.
For Ubuntu users and those with Unix or Linux distributions that can support hfsprogs, you can turn to a detailed thread at Ask Ubuntu for advice on mounting in read-only mode or, with some additional effort, as read/write.
If you’re starting from scratch, you can initialize a drive as MS-DOS (FAT)—better known as FAT32—which is readable up to Windows XP with the Master Boot Record scheme. Or, as long as you’re using Windows 7 or later with a 64-bit PC, you can pick both ExFAT, a replacement that handles much larger files (4GB and larger), and GUID Partition Map. A drive formatted in this fashion can be swapped between a Mac and Windows PC.
However, you might choose instead a format you can use easily with OS X, Windows, and Linux. Topher Kessler wrote in Macworld in December 2014 about using FUSE to extend which formats a Mac can read and write, including the common Linux format ext3.
While ext3 can’t be mounted directly in Windows, you can turn to the free Ext2Fsd Project, which isn’t yet compatible with Windows 10 at this writing. It’s also an unsupported project—there’s no one to complain to about crashes or data failures. For supported software, Paragon’s ExtFS for Windows Professional ($20, works up through Windows 10) will do the trick.
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Hard Drive For Windows 7
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