Review: MacDrive 7

[Editor's Note: I've reviewed the new MacDrive 8 which supports Windows 7. If you're interested, you can find that here.]

When was the last time you used something that just worked? That butter knife you used to spread jam on your toast this morning, did it require a reboot? What about the time you looked at the painting in your living room. You know, the one of the ship at sea or the sad clown. How about a freshly sharpened pencil, piece of bread, or a can of motor oil? You may now add MacDrive 7 to that list, and if you really use Windows on your Mac a lot via Boot Camp, you will find it invaluable. [Removed references to Fusion and Parallels. -Ed.]

So, what does MacDrive do? Simple. It adds HFS and HFS+ capabilities to Windows. HFS is the Hierarchical File System created by Apple as an advanced storage system for the Mac OS. HFS+ was added later to support larges and larger drives. HFS+ even works with the huge terabyte drives we’re seeing today, but Windows doesn’t read it. Windows uses the FAT system, or File Allocation Table. There are FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 versions and Microsoft offers the NTFS (NT File System) for more advanced features. These are like HFS in their own way, but Windows can’t read HFS.

MacDrive allows Windows to read HFS. Where that comes handy for the Mac user is when you’re using Apple’s Boot Camp you can have immediate access to your Mac drives. Yup. You can read and write to them just like any other Windows drive device. The drive (or drives) is even allocated a drive letter. Its amazing how much easier Windows becomes when you have clean, simple, seamless access to your Mac files without having to burn them to CD or DVD, copy them to a Flash drive or external HD, or email them to yourself. For me, it makes it easy as pie to play my iTunes library music without having to make a copy for Windows.

I have installed it in Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista Ultimate, and it works fantastic. Its also supposed to work with HFS formatted external drives like FireWire and USB, and it works with any HFS volumes located on just about any bus, like SCSI, Fiber Channel, and even Parallel Port drives, as well as the expected IDE and SATA. Its really seamless, too. Other that one thing, which I get to next, you simply can’t tell its not a Windows drive, even down to the icons on compatible files showing up correctly.

There is, in all of this sweetness and satisfaction, a tiny, eensy weensy little issue I have, and it does NOT impact the extreme value of MacDrive. It doesn’t hide the Dot files on the Mac side. In UNIX, adding a period to the front of a file name (i.e., “.ProgramFileStuff”) makes it invisible on the file system. These are just files that you don’t use anyway, so its not a loss. I don’t believe, however, that MediaFour, the makers of the superb MacDrive, would actually be able to make such files hidden, since that would mean tinkering with Windows, and its already unstable enough!

This is a fantastic deal at US$49.95, but I would strongly suggest you get the Twin Pack, two copies for just US$59.95. I’ve not experienced anything bad yet (knock on wood!) but so far MacDrive 7 is just a simple and powerful little utility that’s worth ever penny you spend.