It is not possible in a DAS setup without buying specialized software. To share between PC and Mac, you'd need to use some variant of FAT or NTFS and neither was designed for direct shared access. It'd be more sensible to set one up as a fileserver and use gigabit ethernet (unless someone has made a port of GFS2 or similar available for Mac and Windows - it's a filesystem designed for multiple systems accessing at the same time as DAS).

Ah, just re-read and saw that you said "not at the same time." Sure. That's easy and sane. Just use a filesystem that both can use. USB 3 is fast and reliable. Thunderbolt is unnecessary.

Thanks guys. I purchased some software to allow both pc and mac to read each others file sys. Was looking for a solution where I would not need unplug and move hdds from one comp to another.

To be more specific, ideally i'd like to have multiple video projects on the one storage device, finalise edit on the mac then open up the project on the pc and render off and go back to opening up another project on the mac to edit again. This does sound like same time file access.

That usb3 switch looks like a low cost alternative though. thanks

thanks. Im currently using Paragon between the two. Would you suggest formatting NTFS on Windows as it lets you customise cluster size?

Have you ever setup simultaneous access between PC and MAC on your Raid drives, similar to what I am looking at achieving? I think what I am after is a bit more complicated than first thought.

For Premiere editing, what steps would be between PC and macbook Pro?
I assume you would have to save Raw AVCHD in external hard drive.Edit and save project, all previews files in that external hard drive. Get done from Macbook pro. Bring that external hard drive to PC have mac drive installed , let it export to final format? Am I missing something here or what else should be add to?

@ MrFanny- I have never had simultaneous access from both platforms, I have OSX on one SSD and Windows on another, so shut down and boot into other OS. I was told long ago by a tech guy that dual access was problematic at best, if you want this, maybe start looking at a server.

@ Endotoxic. Why would you use Macdrive as a preference? There are many tales of woe where macdrive has corrupted whole drives and lost TB of work. NTFS plays fine with Mac.

You need to unplug any ordinary disk to move to another computer, only a NAS can handle that.

But why is nobody suggesting ExFAT? Works on both sides.

Has anyone had a better way of sharing beetween mac and pc as first qquestion of this thread? I want to build a pc server with same purpose of rendering on it. Could some one point me to the right way. Nowaday, i am on the run with my Retina. I assume that I have to upload on that server and edit from my server?still no way for my old brain -;)

As I said before, with DAS, no standard filesystem exists that safely allows simultaneous access. There are some available for Linux (GFS2), but to the best of my knowledge there are no non-commercial (and expensive!) variants that would work on Mac and PC. Just set up one system to share over the network and mount its drives from the other. Gigabit ethernet is fast enough for most video editing use cases including 1080p raw (if you can write it out to a 95MB/s card (760 megabit), you're not even close to 1 gigabit).

In my experience when using exFat to share with Mac and PC it is best to format the drive on the PC.

I have found that if formatted on the Mac, some PC's while able to read are unable to write to the disk.
I have never experienced this when the drive has been formatted on the PC.
I do not know why :)