Storage Transfer from Mac OSX to Windows 10

[snox__]

Greetings all! I have a dead 10 year old mac that I need to transport data from. OSX 10.7 to Windows 10 64bit. This is my first attempt to do this across operating systems. The hard disk drives in question are 2 500GB drives with SATA data and power connections. I'm curious to see what techniques you might have used. I'm planning on dumping all data onto a working MacBook then transferring it to an external drive. External drive to PC. Easy right?

My concerns:
1)Any formatting issues I should be aware of?
2)Any hardware I should avoid?

Anything I'm missing? Please let me know.

Please and thank you everyone!!

 

[Solandri]

OS X uses HFS+, and can read NTFS (Windows) but can't write to it.
Windows uses NTFS, but can't read nor write HFS+.

So to use an external drive to share files between OS X and Windows, format it as exFAT. It shouldn't matter which OS you use to format it, but I've heard it works better if you format it under Windows. Do a trial run copying some small files first to make sure it's accessible on both OSes, before you spend several hours copying 1 TB of data.

If you want to plug the Mac drives directly into the Windows computer, you'll need a Windows program which can read HFS+. HFSExplorer can do this (read only).

http://www.catacombae.org/hfsexplorer/

Paragon had a HFS+ driver which could read/write HFS+ on Windows 8.1 and earlier. I'm not sure if it works on Windows 10. Also, an earlier version of this driver had a serious bug which could randomly corrupt your entire HFS+ volume when writing files to it. So I'd use it only to read files.

https://www.paragon-software.com/home/hfs-windows-free/

The other option is to connect the old drives to the Macbook, plug the Macbook into your LAN, and copy the files to a Windows shared folder over the LAN. This is the most straightforward way to do it, but I don't like it because OS X writes a bunch of .DS_Store files everywhere. HFS+ supports more file metadata than NTFS, and OS X's way of preserving this extra metadata on Windows shares is to store it in these .DS_Store files.

 

[snox__]

For my purposes this pretty much covers everything I could think of. Thank you very much Solandri!