Moving from PC to Mac Mini

Bristolian

Bristolian

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Steve
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Hi folks, I am a long time PC user and have two computers running 64bit W11 Home. I am thinking of pensioning off the older PC and replacing it with an M1 Mac Mini - 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD - because I could benefit from some extra desk space and, well, I just fancy one :)

The storage set-up I have with the PC in question is three internal drives (1 x 500GB Kingston M.2, 1 x 250GB Samsung SSD, 1 x 1TB Toshiba HDD) plus two 2TB external USB 3.1 drives and a Synology NAS. My plan is to sell the PC with the M.2 and SSD drives but to move the internal HDD to an external caddy for use with the Mac Mini.

The external drives are formatted exFAT but the 1TB internal drive is formatted NTFS. Am I correct in thinking that if I reformat the NTFS drive to ex-FAT I will be able to use it with the Mac Mini?

Obviously, I know I would lose the files on the HDD when formatting but they are replicated on one of the existing external drives and on the NAS, so that's not a problem.

What other things should I be aware of in this change-over?

Thanks in advance :)
 
Bristolian said:
the 1TB internal drive is formatted NTFS. Am I correct in thinking that if I reformat the NTFS drive to ex-FAT I will be able to use it with the Mac Mini?
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Yes but you will then want to format it again with your Mac - Mac Extended (Journaled) or APFS.
 
I'm slightly out of touch with Macs, but they have been able to read NTFS for ages. To write to it you used to need paragon but iirc even that's no longer true. So you could just leave it as is.

But as others have said, best plan would be ship the data off, format the drive to whatever Macs like best and bring it back. Compatibility with other formats is great but there's a reason Apple prefer their own format for their own is.
 
I use an old MacBook as our home server.

Its external drives are formatted as Mac OS Extended. I access them on Windows machines using the network protocol (e.g. \\192.168.1.1). This works for me.

Interoperability between Macs and Windows machines on a network is well established, so my advice would be to trust it.

MacBook and LG17 TZ70 P1030675.jpg
 
Snapsh0t said:
For once I fully agree with LLP. If anything, use the external 2TB drives to back-up the NAS but let the NAS format them to EXT4.
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Hi Snapsh0t and thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, if I format any of the drives to EXT4 my other W11 PC won't be able to write to them without a cludge.

Not ideal and certainly not my preferred solution.
 
Thanks for all the comments/suggestions so far. Perhaps I should have explained how the PC is set up:
1. The 500GB M.2 drive is the system drive and contains the OS and program files.
2. The 256GB SSD contains my LR catalogue(s) and is where image files are stored when downloaded from the camera's memory card.
3. The 1TB internal drive (currently NTFS) is used to store images that have been edited (and I consider them finished) as RAW plus sidecar or .tif if they've been edited outside of LR.
4. One of the 2TB external drives contains all of the original RAW files downloaded from the camera using Nikon's NXTransfer program.
5. The other 2TB external drive is a copy of the 1TB internal drive, plus any exported files in .jpg format.
6. The NAS contains copies of all the files found on 2, 3, 4 & 5 (plus other stuff too). The NAS appears as 5 separate drives on the network.

At the moment, all drives (internal and external) are available directly via the network and I was thinking to have the same setup after getting the Mac Mini but thinking about it drive 3 is only normally accessed from the PC that it is mounted inside so maybe I don't need to be able to access that from my W11 computer. In that case maybe formatting the existing HDD to Mac OS Extended or a new SSD formatted to APFS would be best?

@LongLensPhotography : I prefer to save files and changes to the local drives and let the NAS software backup those new files and changes. I don't have any particular reason for that ... it's just the way I work :)

@AndrewFlannigan : I do hope you're right about the the networking :)

@wornish : The way I overthink things it's quite likely they will have updated it several times before I make a decision :)
 
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