Icarus-1 Loc: Gaithersburg, MD

Hi, so my PC died last night and I decided to switch to a Mac. Then bought the Mac Studio. I have 13 external hard drives of photos and videos and must now copy my photos to XFAT formatted drives to be able to read my photos. Anybody here has experience with this? I’d like to hear out suggestions.

Manglesphoto Loc: 70 miles south of St.Louis

I switched 20 years ago and didn't have any problems

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

First, go here: https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs-mac/

I'm assuming your drives are NTFS format...

If you do decide to format drives as ExFAT, just beware of all the "gotchas" that come with it. Yes, it gets your drive to work on Macs and Windows, but if you unplug it with open files, you WILL lose data, and possibly hose the drive for good. Been there, done that, bought a new drive. Sometimes you can reformat a dead ExFAT drive, but if the drive was in the middle of a read or write, you could get a head crash into the physical media.

If you expect to need Windows compatibility at all, NTFS Mac (see the link above) is a safer way to do it, and it's only $30.

MAC external spinning hard drives should be in MacOS Extended, Journaled format for compatibility with OLDER Macs. Mac solid state drives should be in APFS format for maximum throughput and storage efficiency.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Right answer. Or you could put them all in a Synology NAS with an expansion chassis and connect to the Mac via Gbe or 10Gbe ethernet and access/move files via CIFS or AFP

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

That works, too. OWC also has some Mac-centric solutions, if you need 20 to 100 Terabytes.

https://eshop.macsales.com/search/?q=network+attached+storage

fuminous Loc: Luling, LA... for now...

Absolutely right.... ask me how I know.... and have several terabytes of trash to prove it.

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

Just a quick note: a Mac can read and write ntfs drives over home network if they are on a PC. Cheap and instant solution. Also NAS maybe. I share that way with wife’s PC. No additional SW.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

That would work for the OP if his PC still worked... or if he has another PC.

MJPerini

I believe an NAS would solve your problem, if you find one with an expansion port, and get everything off all your small external drives. And since a good NAS is fault resistant
You will be more secure.
You would set up the NAS on the Mac then plug your drives one at a time into the NAS expansion port.
I am not certain I am correct , but if you call OWC. They will walk you through it and help you pick an NAS.
You could also rent a PC for a week, but call OWC they are very helpful.
Good Look

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

You are correct - a NAS is a very useful data repository that can be accessed by multiple users for sharing and can be accessed anywhere with an Internet connection. It can also incorporate a RAID and snapshots/versioning for additional data protection. Also it can be accessed by Mac, PC and Linux platforms. The NAS doesn’t care because it will serve data as CIFS, NFS or HTTP depending on the client. The only downside relative to direct attached storage (DAS) is speed. Most home users will attach it via gigabit (1000mb) ethernet, so the max transfer speed will never exceed 100 MB/sec., but if you populate it with spinning disk, that’s about the average speed of the disk anyway and also as fast as you can access data via WiFi or over the internet. On the other hand, if you have a 10Gb ethernet backbone and build the NAS out of SSDs, the you can 10x that speed, but that’s generally for high end or commercial applications. Also if you have an old PC lying around, you can use it as a NAS using SW such as TrueNAS, OpenMediaVault, UnRAID, etc.

Laramie Loc: Tempe

And I stayed and never had a problem.

OldCADuser Loc: Irvine, CA

I've never switched...

We bought our first Mac in 1985, a so-called 'Fat-Mac' with 512k of memory versus 128k for the original Mac. Over the years we've gone through maybe a dozen or more machines. Currently I'm running a MacBook M1 Pro and my wife uses a MacBook Air.

When I was working I had to use a PC, but at home, it's always been Mac's and nothing else.

Shellback Loc: North of Cheyenne Bottoms Wetlands - Kansas

Just a thought - You can pick up a used computer or a refurbished one fairly cheap