I have a dualboot "hackintosh" setup with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard running very well, and I use OS X for editing and pretty much everything, but I use Resolve 9 Lite to grade in Windows. I've been having some weird issues where the software randomly stalls for a minute or two, particularly during rendering, what little information I could find online suggests that its because I'm working off of an external HFS+ drive (using MacDrive in my Windows installation). Assuming that I've correctly diagnosed the problem, I want to format a partition on my drive to something that will give me better performance in Resolve under Windows, but ideally will also have solid write/read functionality in OS X. I've looked at exfat and ext2 but haven't found any solid evidence online that suggests either will perform very well and reliably with Resolve and moving between operating systems. Can anyone offer a tip or some advice? Thanks. Here are my other hardware specs: Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz 8 GB ddr2 ram Radeon HD 4850 512 mb (gui) GTX 280 1 GB (gpu)
I haven't seen those issues with MacDrive before - although we normally use it for After Effects, not Resolve. It's always been pretty stable for us on Windows 7. Is your external drive a RAID? Maybe it's the RAID at fault? Do you have the same issue when you boot into Snow Leopard and use Resolve? If it is definitely MacDrive causing the issues - then maybe try this: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows/ exFAT should also work fine between platforms.
I've seen the sorts of issues you're describing with MacDrive quite a few times. Paragon is much better as it actually gives your machine native HFS+ file system support, where as MacDrive is an emulator. Once installed your Windows installation will read HFS+ just as fast as it reads NTFS, even at high bandwidth over very large RAID arrays. It's much cheaper, too and for $29 you can get both the Mac NTFS and Windows HFS+ drivers as a package deal.
Also, if you just need Read Only access - Boot Camp is another free option. But I've imagine you'll want to write to the drive as well - so Paragon makes the most sense.
Okay, I think I'll give Paragon a try. Frustrating since I already paid for a license of MacDrive... but if it works it works. I also found this just now: http://support.mediafour.com/entries/170465-MacDrive-Avid-software-compatibility Which is basically a statement from Mediafour (makers of MacDrive) saying that it wont work well with video editing software As a reference, heres some of the negative things I read about Exfat and this type of OS setup: http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/330/558 http://legacy.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=36374 It sounds like frequently accessing the drive from both OS X and Windows won't work too well - I haven't found any strongly positive mentions of using a drive like this for any video work... Thanks for the help!
Paragon is not working as it should... It says I should change the drive letters in Disk Management to make them functional, but when I try to change to drive letters I get an error message like this: "The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up to date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management or restart the computer" Tried everything it suggested... still not working
We've all been there. But, the painful situations are where you learn the most. It should be no problem. If it's not, you have something deeper going on. There are a number of DITs here in LA using Paragon across Windows and Mac machines they need to have on set, all the way out to swapping large RAID arrays between machines used to capture footage on one, then transcoding on another. Hard to help you pin point over the forum, but if there is a way for you to at least create a new volume to test with, it may help you determine the issue with your current volume.
Juan - I just checked out Stornext, looks very cool. But also probably out of my budget and much more than I need right now. Also, I'm a student and I need the drive to be functional on the school computers as well Jason - The drive in question is a FW800 connected GPT drive with two HFS volumes. I have an external USB drive that I just formatted to GPT and one HFS volume and that was even worse - it showed up as unallocated space in disk manager and asked me to initialize it. I have to get a project rendered so at this point I've switched back to MacDrive, but I'll definitely be playing around and looking for a better solution this weekend Thanks a lot for all the suggestions!
Why are you trying to use two different oses? Seems like it's a really difficult solution to a very simple problem. Use one os.
I think I might have to agree with Juan. It seems like you might be making things tougher on yourself than you need to. You obviously know what you're doing, if you're successfully using a hackintosh, but why introduce an extra level of complexity that you don't need? Yes, the cross-platform file system stuff *should* work, but really, how much time do you wanna spend screwing around with file systems vs getting stuff done? Philosophically I'm fully in support of cross platform everything & hackintoshing and all that stuff...it's awesome, until you spend too much time doing system-level stuff and not enough gettin shit done.
I actually was entirely using OS X until recently when I started teaching myself Resolve. With my hardware it won't run smoothly in OS X. You both are completely right, and in the future I definitely want to upgrade to something simpler. The set up I have now is the result of wanting to run Final Cut Pro and not having a mac, and funny enough now that I want to use Resolve I'm back on windows. Until I have the resources for a new computer I think I'm kinda stuck with what I've got though... the life of a broke student!
I'd work with partitions or multiple volumes to stay hfs in OS X and ntfs in windows then. Exfat is your friend for that.
I have a dual boot hackintosh as well, running macdrive in win7. Somehow Resolve can't deal well with that, because my hfs+ raid 0 is terribly slow in Resolve (not in win7 general). What I did is pretty much Juan's last suggestion; to creates partition formatted in each their native filesystem and copy work across. But I wonder exactly, from a hackintosh pov, what kinda hardware you got, that doesn't enable you get Resolve on the fully functional.
