Can't Reconnect to non Apple Drives

Question

Hi,
Sorry, but I figured that this issues would have been discussed many times over, but couldn't find it when searching.
In the original XSan Days, Spotlight couldn't index the XFS Formatted XSan drives (because XFS doesn't support the Resource Fork of Apple Files), which in turn made it so FCP couldn't reconnect correctly. 
I also ran into this issue 6 months ago on a Untiy System, after moving a lot of Audio, Video and Graphic Files from an HFS Formatted volume to the Unity (not exactly sure the file format they use, but definitely not HFS). 
Now the place I am working at is considering an EditShare System and like all the other NAS Based systems, it uses XFS Formatted Drives.  Has there been an update to the XFS Format, so it now supports the Resource Fork of Apple Files?  Or has there been an update to Spotlight, so it can somehow Index XFS Volumes?
My understanding is that, FCP 7 still uses the Spotlight index to Reconnect Files and if XFS still doesn't support Resource Forks and Spotlight still can't Index XFS volumes, then how can the EditShare people claim that FCP 7 Reconnects work correctly on their system?
Am I totally out of date with my info? Is there a work around that they have implemented, like a hidden program that builds an Index that FCP can read (Like XSan in the old Days)?
Any help Would be Greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Kalagan

Answer 1

Hi Michael,
Yes if we used the "Locate" function and manually found the file it would connect, but manually finding and reconnecting the number of files in most projects is a daunting task. 
To compound the problem, most of our Editors maintained a "Sounds Effects Project", which contained all of the Sounds effect Files that they like to use a lot, some of these projects had a 1000 files in them, Manually reconnecting that many files is a complete nightmare.
From this experience, it seems like Spotlight can't Index non-HFS Formatted drives, whether they are Network drives or not, because (correct me if I'm wrong), even XSan had the same issue when connected via Fiber Channel.
When I was setting up 1st generation XSan Systems, I ran into this issue and the way it was explained to me back then was, XFS Formatted drives don't support the Resource Fork, so when Spotlight tries to Index the drive, it can't, because it uses the Metadata in the Resource Fork to build its index.
Sorry, maybe a long winded answer to your question.
Thanks
Kalagan