[Proff1]

Having previously used a Mac I moved over to a PC as I felt the need to self build, after playing about for a couple of years I have become bored with my setup and feel like giving the newer mac mini a go.

The only thing holding me back is storage space, I have over 2TBs of media held on my HD. What I want to know is, can my old HDDs be used with the mac mini or will I need to buy new HDDs.

Also, will the outputs on a mini enable me to still use my Fiio E7 through USB.

Thanks in advance everyone

 

[MacedonianHero]

To be honest, I 've been thinking the same thing. My first home computer ever was an Apple IIc. Yes I know...a IIc.

Then when the first Macintosh's came out I owned them right through high school. Then university started and it was 100% PC, so I had to switch (20 years ago)...but lately I've also been thinking about my next computer upgrade and the iMac does look very, very tempting.

 

 

[sferic]

Well the ugly truth is, if they are formatted NTFS, you can read them on Mac, but without a lot of flaky add-ons, you won't be able to write to them. FAT32 is really the best cross-platform scheme, but converting them can be quite a process. 
 
That said, hard drives are cheap. Buy another one, format it for Mac, copy the files over and live happily ever after.
 
As much as I love Apple technology, nowadays they are the new Microsoft. Assimilate or be excluded.

 

[xtcriott]

If your hard drives from your PC, the ones with the media, are formatted by the FAT32 type, you will be able to see and use them no problem with a mac. If they are formatted with NTFS, a Windows only format, you will either need to temporarily store your media elsewhere, reformat your drives to FAT32, then transfer your media back onto them.

On another note, I do not understand how a new mac mini will curb your boredom. I am not here to start a Mac/Windows flame war, but instead of possibly having to do all the work to refit your current hard drives to a Mac working standard, why not look into building another PC based in small form factor case? I suggest maybe an NVIDIA ION2/Intel ATOM setup, as they are small, powerful, and pretty new if you spring for the dual core Atom setup. Even a Mini-ATX motherboard will vastly increase your possibilities of build/upgrade. I just implore you to weigh your options, as I have been in your situation before(had a Mac, built a PC), and I am pretty sure my suggested route is where I am headed soon as well.

Good Luck

 

[Uncle Erik]

You might want to burn all of your content onto DVDs, reformat the drive for a Mac, then put the content back on through the DVDs. You should have a clean install and then you'd have everything backed up onto DVDs.

As for the Mini, I'd hold off for a bit. The new one is a nice piece of hardware (I've been severely tempted to get one) but it's due for a refresh. The Mini uses MacBook boards and new MacBooks with the Sandy Bridge chips just rolled out. I would not be surprised to see an i5 (or similar) Mini offered by Christmas.

That's what I'm holding out for. I don't usually upgrade until they upgrade processors.

xtcriott, there are advantages to running an Apple system. I've built a number of PC systems and also run Linux. But I think I'll relegate the Linux box to a server/backup machine and use a Mini for a desktop.

Part of that is to start using a Mac to serve music. I have an iPad, and this will let me use it as a big remote control for a music server. I'd be able to play all my music then switch back over to browsing the Internet. Nothing else on the market lets you do that. It's like having the Sooloos, but without the five figure pricetag.

 

[Currawong]

There are plug-ins that would allow you to use an NTFS disk in Mac OS X.  I haven't checked lately how reliable they are.  You could leave your PC as a file server on your network. If you grab a gigabit ethernet hub you'll get the same or better speeds than USB 2 and there wont be issues writing to the disk that any plug-ins might have.

 

[daigo]

Currawong's suggestion would probably be the least painful way of getting access to your old files from a new mac.  Most portable hdd's that you can buy are also already formatted in FAT32 and have been fairly inexpensive lately (~$50 for a 640 gb was my last purchase) and is one way of transferring over files chunks at a time. 

 

[Proff1]

Great replay's guys, thanks
 
As long as i can re-format my hard drives while i hold the files somewhere else then i am happy, i didn't fancy having to buy 3 TB of new HDDs
 
As to why i wanted to go back to Mac, we have in our household Iphones and Ipads and i feel a Mac would intergrate them much better.
      Also I would love to go back to not hearing fans starting up every few minutes (yes i know i could go for a silent pc, but none of them seem to have the same usability as the Mac Mini without being much more expensive)
 
Any thoughts on the audio quality from a Mac Mini

 

[ardgedee]

Quote:

Great replay's guys, thanks
 
As long as i can re-format my hard drives while i hold the files somewhere else then i am happy, i didn't fancy having to buy 3 TB of new HDDs
 
As to why i wanted to go back to Mac, we have in our household Iphones and Ipads and i feel a Mac would intergrate them much better.
      Also I would love to go back to not hearing fans starting up every few minutes (yes i know i could go for a silent pc, but none of them seem to have the same usability as the Mac Mini without being much more expensive)
 
Any thoughts on the audio quality from a Mac Mini

Depends on whether you intend to use the audio output from the Mac Mini or use digital out to an external DAC. The audio board on the Mini is the same as on the MacBook. The digital out offered is USB, HDMI and mini-Toslink, which nearly covers all the bases.
 
I'm not a big fan of the onboard headphone amp in Apple's portables. They sound better than the few PC laptops I've tried, but not by enough to matter to me.
 
I use an old iBook for my iTunes music server (EDIT: I use Home Sharing - link is to Apple's documentation), which means the actual music playback is on whatever computer I'm listening from, so I'm usually playing the audio through my MacBook Pro. (When the iOS 4.3 update ships, I'll be able to listen to files on the music server from my iPhone and iPad too. That'll be nice.)
 
Realistically, the music server can be whatever runs iTunes, so if you're retiring your Windows box for a desktop Mac, keep the files on the drive on the Windows box, and put that in some out of the way corner of the house. Then you can listen to those files from your Mac (it will be Whatever-Your-Windows-Machine-Is-Called Shared Library), or even copy the files to your Mac through iTunes.
 
I like Uncle Eric's DVD idea, just for backup purposes.

 

[sphinxvc]

Skip burning 3TB of (700) DVDs.  It is more than likely that your storage devices will not work with the Mac but the good news is that you can reformat those drives to work with the Mac, however in my experience, this usually renders the drive unable to work in Windows.  There are plenty of tutorials online on how to format drives to work with both Mac and PC using various formats but it is still finicky at best...it's never worked perfectly in my experience, so I would not advise going that route.  Also, it's quite easy to create a simple network between the Mac and PC using a ethernet cable, if you need that.  Using an ipad as a remote also extends to the ipod touch, if you have one.  If you're playback is FLAC you may have a couple more issues with the Mac, but converting to ALAC to work seamlessly is quite easy as well.

 

[xtcriott]

Um, FAT32 works very well between the two platforms, Windows and Mac. I have had at least 3 or 4 external drives formatted with FAT32 that I used with my desktop PC and my iBook G4. Never finicky and has always worked. If you format a drive with HFS or similar from the Mac, yes it will be unreadable in Windows without the use of certain software(I just did this to recover files from my GF's old MBP after it died). The same goes for a drive formatted with NTFS from Windows, it is unreadable without the aid of third party software. But in my experience FAT32 works fine as a universal format standard.
 
Quote:

There are plenty of tutorials online on how to format drives to work with both Mac and PC using various formats but it is still finicky at best...it's never worked perfectly in my experience, so I would not advise going that route. 

 

 

[sferic]

I agree with xtcritott. FAT32 is the universal. The other thing you should think about, Mac Toslink vs Firewire vs USB for communication with a DAC. Cheap firewire interfaces whine, but great ones (Apogee) sing. Toslink has a mediocre repute, and USB, well, we don't have USB3 in Macland but I think we all know the limitations of USB2.
 
 iTunes is a GREAT librarian, but crappy player, dark & grainy vs the (limited) alternatives. That said, I'm happy with my MacPro playing music thru Play or Audirvana, with Firewire output to Apogee DAC. Life is complex. I'm bi-computorial, but for pleasure love my Macs, with added expense.

 

[Red Jacket Mike]

As part of my business I restore and convert old movie film and analog video to digital; often my customers will give me a bare/stripped hard drive to put QuickTime or wmv files of their digitized material on.  I use Macs, and often the clients have PCs, so I have been using this software to format these drives.  
 
That way, I can write to them on my Mac, and they can read them on their PCs.  I'm sure this would be an easy solution for transferring your data/music, etc., from a PC formatted drive to a Mac.  
 
It costs roughly $35.00 US, and has a free download and 15 day trial, which might be enough to get your transfer done if you're ultimately going to end up with only a Mac.  

 

[drandall]

certainly you can reformat the drives and simply restore the data...
 
but you can get a nice 2TB external hard drive (64MB cache, 7200rpm, firewire400, USB2, aluminum enclosure) for around $200...you might consider moving your media to the new external drive and then repurposing your older drive/s to be a backup. download a free copy of the excellent "carbon copy cloner" and you can do automatic backups and even create bootable clones of your main HD.
 
any drive can fail and redundancy is cheap insurance.

 

[Proff1]

 
any drive can fail and redundancy is cheap insurance.
[/quote]

Great point drandall, I have always put off backing up my data but this seems like I good time to do this, can any of us imagin loosing all our music and video files!

And yes ardgedee I had thought of using my current setup as a file server, but if I'm honest it makes so much noise and uses so much power I think I would be better off without it. Plus I have made the case out of my children's Lego and I think they would like it back!