# External drive for both pc and macbook



## belgiantaff (May 20, 2017)

I hold my LR catalogue and files on an external Lacie drive, and run LR on a Windows 10 pc and on my macbook. Recently the Lacie drive has been giving trouble but only on the mac - it works well on the pc.
Has anyone an recommendation on what I can buy to replace the Lacie, please? I need around 300Gb for my photo files.


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## clee01l (May 20, 2017)

The LaCie brand is now owned by Seagate.  Your other choices are Western Digital and Toshiba.   LaCie is certainly well experienced with MacOS.  It simply may be that the current drive has reached the end of it usable life.  I'd get another LaCie if the price was reasonable.


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## Roelof Moorlag (May 20, 2017)

Nice diagram Cletus!


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## Roelof Moorlag (May 20, 2017)

belgiantaff said:


> I hold my LR catalogue and files on an external Lacie drive, and run LR on a Windows 10 pc and on my macbook. Recently the Lacie drive has been giving trouble but only on the mac - it works well on the pc.
> Has anyone an recommendation on what I can buy to replace the Lacie, please? I need around 300Gb for my photo files.


Windows and Mac are not using the same filesystems so standard a new drive could cause some trouble to write on both platforms. Do you know how you have handled this on your current EHD? If not, you can come back here when your new hardrive has arrived.


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## clee01l (May 20, 2017)

Roelof Moorlag said:


> Nice diagram Cletus!


Thank Wikipedia.


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## clee01l (May 20, 2017)

Roelof Moorlag said:


> Windows and Mac are not using the same filesystems so standard a new drive could cause some trouble to write on both platforms. Do you know how you have handled this on your current EHD? If not, you can come back here when your new hardrive has arrived.


Since it has worked for the OP in the past, presumably the volume is using exFAT as the universal file system or the OP has formatted it NTFS and runs an intermediate app to read and write NTFS files on MacOS.


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## belgiantaff (May 23, 2017)

The LaCie is formatted as exFAT. It is now working, but seems very much slower on the mac (Sierra latest; 16Gb) than on the pc (Win 10; 24Gb). The mac takes an eternity to load the catalogue and pictures, whilst on the pc it is almost immediate.


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## clee01l (May 23, 2017)

belgiantaff said:


> The LaCie is formatted as exFAT. It is now working, but seems very much slower on the mac (Sierra latest; 16Gb) than on the pc (Win 10; 24Gb). The mac takes an eternity to load the catalogue and pictures, whilst on the pc it is almost immediate.


Then the question becomes one of I/O which has nothing to do with LR.  How is the EHD connected to each machine?  USB2 (slower) or USB3 (faster)?  Is there a USB hub involved?  Can you connect the LaCie to the Mac via a Thunderbolt port (fastest)?


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## belgiantaff (May 23, 2017)

Yes, that must be it. The mac has only USB2 whilst the pc has usb3 connections. I can't connect the LaCie using thunderbolt unless it will accept a different cable - I'll research that . Thanks a lot!


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