File server for Mac and Windows?

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Limp Gawd
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I am sure this is posted on here somewhere, but wasen't sure what to search for.

Ok, so I am a cinematographer and photographer , and I have hours of video, and audio files, and literally thousands of photos. But I use both my mac and the PC, and I was wondering whats the best and easiest way to make the files available to both computers?

I need to be able to read, and write to the drive from both computers. But I tried that with my external drives, and due to FAT32 I have a 4GB limit on file size. And with my HD Video files, you can forget 4GB limit.

Any advice, is greatly appreciated.
 
My Mac holds all my pictures and music. They are on a firewire drive on my Mac and I use symbolic links that are placed under user/volumes/ to point to the drives. I then just use a standard "Map Network Drive" in Windows to get access to everything.

I had to do some trial and error to get Windows to work with Mac...I guess Windows changed some stuff going into Vista (I think it was SMB settings). Anyways I had to allow SMB connections and change the Duplex mode on the NIC in Windows other wise OSX would either get rejected or have EXTREMELY slow connections to Windows.

I can't comment on the 4GB thing. The closest thing I have is FRAPS, and it automatically breaks up video streams into 4GB chunks as it records, so I haven't dealt with that issue yet.
 
Oddly enough I think the cheapest and easiest option would be a prebuilt Windows Home server:
$350 - HP StorageWorks X310 with 1TB of storage
$450 - acer Aspire Easystore AH340-U2T1H with 2TB of storage

Yes WHS will work with a Mac and Windows PC.
 
westrock2000 said:
My Mac holds all my pictures and music. They are on a firewire drive on my Mac and I use symbolic links that are placed under user/volumes/ to point to the drives. I then just use a standard "Map Network Drive" in Windows to get access to everything.

I had to do some trial and error to get Windows to work with Mac...I guess Windows changed some stuff going into Vista (I think it was SMB settings). Anyways I had to allow SMB connections and change the Duplex mode on the NIC in Windows other wise OSX would either get rejected or have EXTREMELY slow connections to Windows.

I can't comment on the 4GB thing. The closest thing I have is FRAPS, and it automatically breaks up video streams into 4GB chunks as it records, so I haven't dealt with that issue yet.
Click to expand...

Yeah heard something about the SMB settings before. I am pretty sure doing a file server and setting up windows correctly takes out the 4GB transfer rate, because its throught the server. I will have to look into this more. Right now I just back it all up on a external drive.
 
I second what blu3phoenix says...
take an old pc and use it as a SAMBA server...
I use fedora ext4 as filesystem and I have several 10Gig+ HD movies on it, no prob :)
(I cannot comment on windows server things as I don't use it; although I can verify the size problem with FAT32 :p).
that way you have a 'central' storage pool which you can access with any system.
 
Grab one of those HP EX495's and populate it with 2TB drives as needed. I've helped a novice help set his up. The best thing about the purchased solution is how helpful HP has been with him as he's had questions. Works perfectly fine with Macs also. Just don't purchase any advanced format drives. The don't work well with WHS.
 
I believe there is a jumper to set on WD EARS series drives to disable the advanced format so they are happy with WHS.
 
I'm pretty sure there is no way to disable advanced format (4KB physical sectors). I guess what you are thinking of is the jumper that adds a one logical (512B) sector offset to the LBA to align the writes for situations where the first partition starts at 63 instead of a 4KB aligned LBA.
 
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