Best way to format a drive for both Mac and PC?

#12

Like someone else said, read support is built in but not write. NTFS is probably closed-source, so any implementation of write is a reversed-engineered hack, which would be too risky to add natively since MS doesn’t have to document changes to the FS. just a guess.

#13

just a note that you should be careful about what you put on the NTFS system since file permissions, ACLs and Mac-specific things might not work correctly. Documents would be okay, probably, but avoid anything like applications, Mac Postscript fonts or system-specific items like that.

#14

What you’re asking for is exFAT. A better solution in a studio environment would be to use a file server or NAS and let the workstations share data through that. Then the filesystem wouldn’t matter to the clients because the data would be accessed through networking protocols (SMB, NFS, AFP, whatever).

#15

Huh?
Sorry, but Lion, Mountain Lion, and any MS from vista and on supports it, and MS has an even tighter and fiercer grip on NTFS, while they are desperate to see exFAT picking up and loosened constraints considerably.
That makes it both MORE adopted AND not as tightly gripped by the balls.

In fact, take note of how NTFS isn’t natively supported in macs, while exFAT is.

So, still don’t see why NTFS is being recommended over exFAT other than oversight, or people not being aware of it being so convenient these days.

#16

i’m not aware of it being as convenient for mac users… but good to know.

#17

It’s listed under the format options for Disk Utility so it seems like a good option. I just haven’t used it before.

#18

Well, then the thread served a purpose.
Maybe time for some testing and writing an article of your own about it Beige :slight_smile:

I know I’ve moved teras worth of data on drives (even chained JBODs that got picked up correctly on both) with it coming from my editor, but all my experience is windows side, the Mac counterpart was coming from someone else.

#19

I’m curious to know how it performs as well and if there are any gotchas. :thumbsup:

#20

For a desktop drive kind of scenario, I didn’t notice any great difference from my e-SATA or my NAS (which is surprisingly fast). On large files sustained for a while they all cap more or less the same at what the controller’s buffer can handle from the disk, so anywhere between 70 and 100+spare change MBps.

I haven’t tried the many small files scenario, or the office and data management scenarios as those just don’t exist much in my IT life (my many small files scenarios will usually be capped by git a lot sooner than the drives or my bandwidth can struggle).

For home, or any single drive, use I’d be surprised to see any modern file system even just edging past another.
In a corporate environment and when it comes to reliability I’m sure things would differ, but at that point any sane person leaves it to the storage system requirements to guide those choices, and they are very unlikely to be any sort of fat or ntfs if you use a unix system.

#21

Here a nice article about this;

http://externaldisk.co.uk/article/2012/05/14/format-my-drive-for-mac-and-windows.html

The guy say that while exFAT is nice, it is slower and use more memory than FAT32.

The guy recommand to stick with fat32 but I really cannot. I got a lot of big ZIP and MOV files to backup that are bigger than 4gb.

Time capsule will not work with NTFS…

#22

Maybe the best way for me would be to format the disk in 2 partitions, one 500gb for my current (windows) projects, then the rest in OS X Extended Journaled.

That way I can still use the disk on both system and use it for time capsule.

I presume windows will just ignore the Extended Journaled partition?

#23

Thats exactly what I used to do and it worked fine, though after this Ill probably just stick with exfat, I was always under the impression it still had the 4 gig limit and just allowed for drives over 2 tb

#24

I doubt the claims of noticeably inferior performance, but regardless, I can’t see why you shouldn’t do what you propose at least to have time capsule running.
You were already willing to format the Drive anyway, just do it and see if it works, and report back IMO.

#25

so I pitched the exFAT article to the Ars editors and they are interested, so we should have something on the site in the couple months, since I want it to be a “month with exFAT” type article so any problems that could creep up would probably show up in that time.

#26

I demand credit and royalties!

#27

lol… well, i too would be interested in the read. can you (when complete) make it sharable for us here?

#28

I challenge you to get the word Fragapane into the article. Google tells me it means strawberry bread in latin if that helps.

#29

Having had a look at that article, and other more reputable sources, I would ignore it wholesale.
He’s just spewing some common misconceptions and offering nothing to back them up.

exFAT is agreed upon to be safer, more efficient, and way faster in almost every case than FAT32, with the only exception of small volumes with many small equally sized files written sequentially, which is unlikely to interest you.

Space allocation and deletion (since exFAT offers a proper file map) in example is something retardedly faster, dozens to hundred times faster for the seek.

As it was born for flash drives and all it misses a lot of security features and the such (only has access control per file, no encryption etc.), but for an external device across platforms that’s fine. Also, it’s not like FAT32 has ANY of those anyway, it’s a very dated, very horrible file system that was well behind the curve only shortly after it was released, as most of DOS was anyway, which had the one and only redeeming quality at the times of being cheap.

#30

I’ve just partionned the drive (1tb Exfat, 1tb Mac Journaled). It took 1sec. :curious:

Here another guy not too happy about Exfat;

(ex)FAT, like FAT is at the lowest level of reliability:
If anything goes wrong, you will get damaged files, directories
and may even lose files that were not involved in the operation.
To put it differently, FAT expects everything to work correctly,
but is very simple to implement.

ext2/3/4 on the other hand are filesystems that expect things
to go wrong. In the Unix world, computers traditionally run
24/7 and the expected reason for a restart is an unexpected
power failure. Hence these filesystems have a high resilience
against things going wrong, with data-loss typically only
in files that were written at the moment of the power-failure
and no impact on other files. The downside is complex
implementation.

That said, (ex)FAT is about the worst possible option for
a backup target device. Don’t use it. You are mixing two
functions here: Cross platform compatibility with Win und
OSX and backup-level reliability. That gives you a
“solution” that is not really suitable for either.

From here:
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/reliable-exfat-fat64-t4033687.html

#31

exFAT is not supposed to be secure and safe by nature, of course practically anything coming from the unix world will put it to shame, it’s a file format born to quickly deal with disposable data on external devices with loose mapping.

Saying FAT expects and keeps things safe though is extremely asinine. FAT, in its FAT32 incarnation, has been the laughing stock of file systems for the longest time.

exFAT single tabled (because doubly tabled is hardly supported) suffers the problems he described on USB sticks or memory cards because it’s very susceptible to power loss, in that case FAT is arguably more reliable. For a powered drive that’s not the case and the tabling and file mapping are superior.

The irony of it is that exFAT sort of fails at what it was intended for originally (removable media), but does extremely well at what they never thought it would have been used for (video drive and moving between mac and win).