Moving from all Windows to mixed Windows/Mac landscape

rmurgz wrote:
Conscious of the NTFS/exFat/HFS+ compatibility considerations for external drives I was wondering if there were any particular issues or configuration considerations with file formats on the NAS drives too as I would rather not have to reconfigure my NAS and 4x hard drives.

File SYSTEM formats: No issue whatsoever. The NAS uses it's own filesystem format, but that's completely hidden to NAS clients. readynas units support both native windows (SMB/CIFS) and native apple (AFP/netatalk) protocols. (Actually, Mac's also support SMB for normal shares.)

As for FILE FORMATS, there can be some compatibility issues. Common formats, such as "JPG", "MP3", "TIFF", "AVI", and so-on are compatible across both platforms. You may encounter some formats on your Macs that you'll need an additional program to read on your Windows machines. (Example: I don't think Windows supports quicktime natively - you have to install .. quicktime.) Windows tends to use 3 character extensions for most everything, while Mac uses the proper extensions. (example: JPG vs JPEG) Modern Windows programs, however, can usually work with the longer file extensions. Obviously, executable formats are completely incompatible. Program.exe won't work on OSX, and Program.app won't work on Windows.

(One interesting thing is if you put a Mac app on your NAS, it usually appears as a single file. If you look at that "file" from Windows, you might see that it's actually an entire directory structure.)

As for what you are using them for: I don't think you'll encounter many issues with FILE FORMATS doing photo editing. What photoshop supports in one, it supports in the other. I don't know if lightroom databases are compatible across platforms, but the adobe xmp sidecar files ARE compatible.

Take care
Gary