ntfs

Toshiba announced today that its Canvio 3.0 and Canvio Basics 3.0 portable hard drives now offer up to 1.5TB of storage space, the second largest capacity on the market for portable external hard drives.

These two drives both support USB 3.0 (and are compatible with USB 2.0). The Canvio 3.0 also comes in a very sleek-looking chassis and now includes software drivers to make Macs support the NTFS file system.

NTFS is the native file system of Windows in which the Canvio drives are preformatted and generally can only be read by Macs. The … Read more

Microsoft is switching to the Resilient File System for Windows 8, but only the server edition will support the new and more robust file system.

ReFS is built on the foundation of the current and almost 20-year-old NTFS file system. But it's been designed from the ground floor to offer several advantages, particularly for servers.

As described in the latest Building Windows 8 blog by Surendra Verma, a development manager on Microsoft's Storage and File System team, ReFS will be unveiled and phased in as part of Windows Server 8, so IT administrators will be able to give … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers. This week readers had questions on the FileVault 2 log-in screen only showing account icons, options for attaching multiple displays on an iMac, writing to NTFS-formatted hard drives in OS X, and formatting PC drives to use on a Mac. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present a few answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your suggestions in the comments.

Question: FileVault 2 log-in screen only shows account icons MacFixIt reader "Clark" … Read more

The OS X 10.7 upgrade should work independently of your Boot Camp installations, but some people may find that after upgrading to Lion their Boot Camp installations are no longer accessible. In some instances the Boot Camp partition will disappear and will not show up in the start-up disk preferences or in the Finder. In other instances the volume may still be present in OS X but will not boot when attempting to load Windows. The reason for these problems may be as simple as an improperly configured driver or because of custom partition configurations on your boot drive.… Read more

Our utilities update report is a column on updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there were updates to file recovery software, some drive monitoring utilities, and duplicate file management tools.

Files and filesystem Sometimes locating duplicate files (especially groups of them after migrating files) can be useful for clearing up hard-drive space. GrupaDupa, … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is on bringing you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week we have had updates to a few notable maintenance utilities, as well as an update to a small system-monitoring menu extra and an NTFS filesystem driver.

Maintenance In maintenance utility updates this past week, MacCleanse now has support for … Read more

As mentioned in an earlier article by MacFixIt's Topher Kessler, users may encounter issues when attempting to download Apps or App updates from the Mac App Store. Apple has now posted a knowledge base article describing a likely solution for most users.

When clicking the updates icon at the top of the Mac App Store window, the application may become unresponsive. This issue could be related to third party NTFS software including partitions with certain Windows NTFS file systems.

To alleviate the issue, navigate to System Preferences > Spotlight and click the Privacy tab. Add any of your NTFS … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Among many things, Seagate's GoFlex family of portable hard drives were well-received during 2010 because they come with software drivers that allow Macs to read and write to them, even when they're reformatted using NTFS, the file system of the Windows operating system.

Now the role is reversed. The company announced today a new collection of GoFlex for Mac external drives that are reformatted using the HFS+ file system for Mac OS X and come with software drivers that allow them to work fully with Windows.

While this is not confirmed, the software is likely a rebranded version of Paragon's HF+ for Windows or something of that sort, which normally costs extra to use.

Other than that, each GoFlex for Mac product comes bundled with FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 adapters and cables--the most popular interfaces for Apple computers. Like all other GoFlex drives, however, they support the flexibility to change the drive's interface to USB 3.0 or powered eSATA for use with Windows computers, or in case your Mac supports these types of connectivity.

Design-wise, the new GoFlex drives for Macs share a similar look as those for Windows but come in white and feature a durable, metallic-finish chassis, which, according to Seagate, is designed to withstand scratches, fingerprints, or other marks incurred from regular usage.

The new lineup of GoFlex for Mac external drives includes: … Read more

Freeware's cool, but some programs are worth paying for. Antivirus, graphics, and accounting tools justify their cost if they outperform their free competitors, but for our money, nothing beats top-quality backup software. And for our system, nothing provides the level of security, total restoration capability, and confidence like Acronis True Image Home Edition. Acronis automatically creates full, incremental, and custom backups; remote backups; and even optional Internet-based backups with file synchronization features. It also includes a variety of tools for cleaning disks and shredding files, creating bootable media and secure partitions, backing up settings, adding and cloning disks, sandboxing … Read more