Product Reviews

Since Apple's move to Intel processors and the arrival of technology such as Apple's Boot Camp, which allows you to run Windows natively on your Mac, Macs and PCs have never co-existed so cosily.

Not everything is harmonious, however. Because each platform uses different and largely incompatible native disk standards - HFS+ for Mac, NTFS for newer versions of Windows - sharing volumes between them can prove an exercise in frustration.

MacDrive is a near-perfect answer to this problem. It lets you directly access Mac-formatted disks from any computer running recent versions of Windows. Once installed on a PC, any attached HFS+ drive, including the iPod, is treated as a regular Windows volume. It appears in Windows Explorer, Windows' version of the Finder, and the only apparent distinction from native NTFS drives is that the MacDrive-enabled volumes sport an Apple badge.

You certainly can't tell the difference in terms of speed. Moving files between a host PC and an external Mac-formatted USB drive was as fast as from the Mac.

MacDrive also works well on some virtual machines. If you're running Boot Camp, for example, MacDrive lets you access the Mac partition as well as the Windows partition. We found that we couldn't do the same when running Windows as a virtual machine through Parallels. This limitation may well be by design - simultaneous access to files through two operating systems sounds like a recipe for trouble - and as Parallels has a workmanlike folder-sharing feature of its own, this can't be considered a flaw.

There are a couple of big changes in MacDrive 7. Into the 'prosaic but vital' category goes support for Windows Vista - previous

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versions wouldn't run under Redmond's latest operating system. The more exciting arrival is that as well as formatting and partitioning Mac disks, you can now analyse and repair them. The analysis feature is basic, but we can see the appeal of the ability to repair an HFS+ disk when you're not near a Mac.

Through a simple Options window, MacDrive also offers a rudimentary tool to burn Mac-formatted DVDs and CDs. This only comes into its own when you need to burn Mac-specific optical discs.

The Options window also solves another compatibility problem - if a Mac file lacks a filename extension, how does Windows know which application to open it with? MacDrive handles this elegantly through a setting that maps Mac creator codes to Windows file extensions. A decent selection of translators is built in, and you can build your own mappings.

Allowing Windows and its attendant security threats free access to files on your Mac drives comes with obvious risks of malware infection. To address this, MacDrive offers a read-only mode that can be turned on and off in the Options window, although you must reboot the PC for the change to take effect. This prevents write access - including file repair - to Mac-formatted drives. In most cases, it's a sensible option to turn on. But it would be even better if you could opt to have certain drives made read only, so you could write to an external USB drive while restricting access to a Mac's hard disk.

It's also worth remembering the other, unavoidable security risk: Windows ignores Mac OS X file permissions, so anyone with physical access to your PC could potentially open any home folders on a connected Mac drive. You'll need to make sure your Mac is locked down in other ways if you need to limit Windows access to your personal data.

Not everyone transferring files between PC and Mac will need MacDrive. For example, USB flash drives are often formatted in FAT32, a file system that both operating systems understand. But FAT32 has limitations that render it redundant for large files, so if you're moving multi-gigabyte documents around, Mediafour's MacDrive is the best way to share media on an external drive between two operating systems. It isn't perfect, but it's reasonably priced, reliable and recommended.