I have a Mac Mini 2010 with 8GB RAM, 2 HFS+ external drives and two NTFS external drives. I can connect the external hard drives to the Mini using Firewire 800 or USB 2.0. For Parallels 8, while running the Windows 7-64 OS, I would like to access the NTFS drives from Parallels via USB. Do I need Paragon NTFS for this functionality to work? I bought a license a couple months ago, but haven't used it yet. Please advise. Thanks!
windows is able to read/write NTFS drives natively. no need for extra software. plug the drive in via USB and connect it to windows. it should show up in "my computer"
I received an email this morning from Parallels addressed to "Benjamin" with the instructions below. They didn't seem right to me so I posted my question to the Parallels forum. I suppose this is what you get sending questions to India where the people responding know only canned responses (hence "Benjamin") and don't know the English language. ---------- On Nov 25, 2012, at 11:47 AM, "Girishankar Chandra Maulidara, Parallels" <support@support.parallels.com> wrote: Hello Benjamin, Thank you for your response. We always appreciate customer feedback. I am here to help you through your issue so let’s work on a resolution together. Please follow the steps mentioned below in order to resolve the issue: 1. Please connect the USB Hard drive to MAC. 2. Click on the Devices on top menu bar -> USB -> Connect the USB Hard drive. 3. Please download and install the Paragon software to access the data on NTFS drive. To download the Paragon Software please refer the below link: http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/ Please let us know if the troubleshooting steps provided helped resolve the issue. Please let us know if the issue still persists and we would be happy to help you further. This ticket will be placed in a Pending Confirmation by Customer status. Benjamin, you can reply to this email within 14 days and the ticket will be reopened automatically. After 14 days the ticket will be placed in a closed status and can not be re-opened Awaiting your reply. Best regards, -- Girishankar.M Technical Support Engineer || Parallels Knowledge Base: http://kb.parallels.com
So, as a followup question to the Forum... Why in the world would Parallels tech support give the advice above?
i can partially understand their weird advice. after all, 2 out of 3 steps are necessary. if you need to write to the NTFS drive from the mac side, you'll need third party software. so if you have a word doc on the external drive, you can edit it in office on windows without issue. however if you then need to edit it on the mac side, you'll need to make a copy locally or install a third-party solution. another solution that does not require any third-party software is to format the drive as exFAT. windows and os x can read/write exFAT natively.
