WHY does drive formatting not matter across networks?

[Video Beagle]

This is something I was pondering at 4am instead of sleeping.

 

In my home system,  I have both an iMac and Windows 10 PC. The iMac uses HFS+ for the drives, the PC NTFS.  Neither can natively read/write to the other (putting aside things like Paragon software that enables that on either).

 

BUT, If I connect to the PC from the mac (or vice versa), the drives can be mounted and used across the network with no issues.

 

I'm just wondering the technical reason this works if anyone knows?

 

[flibberdipper]

My best guess is some fancypants "interpolation" in the protocol used (such as how you can use an ext4 share on a Linux server with Windows using samba).

[Blake]

1 hour ago, Video Beagle said:

This is something I was pondering at 4am instead of sleeping.

 

In my home system,  I have both an iMac and Windows 10 PC. The iMac uses HFS+ for the drives, the PC NTFS.  Neither can natively read/write to the other (putting aside things like Paragon software that enables that on either).

 

BUT, If I connect to the PC from the mac (or vice versa), the drives can be mounted and used across the network with no issues.

 

I'm just wondering the technical reason this works if anyone knows?

Because your not talking to the disk directly, your telling the other system to write X or read Y from the disk. 

 

Http doesn't care about the OS, Neither does SMB, or NFS, or whatever your are using to setup the files share, they just care that the other system can speak the same thing.

[Windows7ge]

That's the magic of IEEE standards. Allowing cross-platform communication via a common network language.

What you're looking at is:

Data on an NTFS disk > Broken into (commonly) 1500 byte network packets which carry a payload of the data your sending/receiving > received by a system/server which de-encapsulates the packets and moves them to the disk using any other file system.

 

In other words the systems aren't converting NTFS to other or other to NTFS on both ends they're interpreting the network protocol in use (SMB/CIFS, NFS, etc.) and taking that raw data and adapting it to what the system uses natively.

 

The only exception to this rule I can think of (and this is kind of a stretch) might be iSCSI as it uses TCP/IP to carry block level data across the network so you're effectively carrying NTFS to the server or other compatible device. Even then though it's a partitioned virtual disk on the receiving server/client.