Before a few days I bought Parallels 4.0 for my Mac 10.4 (Tiger) which is running on an Intel Core Duo Mac Mini. Since I have a windows box running for mastering, paying taxes and for internet browsing for my wife I suddenly had to exchange data from one computer to another. You should also know that I own a few external harddisks. My 2Big triple from Lacie is one of those, a perfectly nice Raid controller with 2 disks in a decent box.

For several reasons I had to format this one in NTFS and most of you know that this is a total game over for my Mac. Mac cannot access this format safely. There are other options to access NTFS from a Mac, for example Paragons software, but really, I don’t trust those geek software in that case too much. Hej, this is my data! My music! My life!

Then I came to Parallels Desktop, a Virtual Machine Player (and Creator) which is known as well integrated into the mac enviroment. And yes, it really is! I was never so surprised by any kind of software like I was here. Parallels makes you feel 100% integrated on both sides! With Tiger I cannot use all features, for example this Bootcamp stuff, which allows to play with your VM on a native speed level. However, for me it’s enough to see my windows apps looking like mac apps and that I can drag and drop between Finder and Win Explorer as I want.

Back to NTFS. I plugged in my NTFS drive but couldn’t create any folder on it nor could I copy a file. After some curses I figured out that I have mounted my 2Big Triple as a Network Storage, not as a local harddisk. Of course as a network harddisk I would need write access within mac, so I had to mount this drive directly to Parallels. This is easy under normal cirstumances. You can do this on the right bottom of the Parallels window, or, if running in coherance mode, from the menu bar “devices”. Simply choose one of the devices which you want to plug directly to your Windows.

I did so, but failed. The reason is beeing shown in the Device Manager of Windows. My USB Hub didn’t get any driver. I double clicked that b**** and told it to update the drive. No problem for windows since everything was prepared on the update site. After the install I had a locally plugged Harddisk – and know I can access to my NTFS harddisk from my Mac, ah, Windows, damn Macdows without any problems.

Great stuff, that Parallels. I will track this software for sure.