Which is the best file system to use in an external hard drive?

Question

Possible Duplicate:
What filesystem for shared (read/write) PC/Mac external drive?

I've bought a Samsung S2 500GB External Hard Drive. The disk came with FAT32 file system, but I formatted it to NTFS to use large files in it, but now I can't write the disk on Mac OS X. Which file system should I use that is compatible with large files and Mac OS X/Windows reading and writing?

possible duplicate of this and this. – Daniel Beck Mar 05 '11 at 20:54 — Daniel Beck, Mar 05 '11 at 20:54

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:58

3

try exFAT, which becomes available for more and more OSes. OS X supports it since 10.6.5, Windows supports it since Vista. There are updates for oler Microsoft OSes.

exFAT supports large files.

answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:58

lajuette

4,732

Seems that exFAT is a good solution. It works with Windows 7 and Mac OS X for writing and reading large files. – Fábio Perez Mar 05 '11 at 21:02
I already tested it on a 16GB USB stick. It worked quite well. And there's a linux kernel module in the making (see sources in linked wikipedia article) – lajuette Mar 05 '11 at 22:46

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:50

1

This article, How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X, should get you started.

answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:50

JRobert

6,914

NTFS-3g no longer works for the newest 64 bit only Macs. – Daniel Beck Mar 05 '11 at 20:55
This leads me to this: http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/. I really don't want to pay 25 EUR for NTFS support on Mac. – Fábio Perez Mar 05 '11 at 20:56
@FábioPerez There's still a free version if you scroll down a bit. Also, see the topic I linked to. – Daniel Beck Mar 05 '11 at 20:58

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:51

1

There isn't a perfect one; FAT32 has file size and filesystem size limitations on OSX, and NTFS isn't supported natively without add-ons like NTFS-3g (which may not work reliably in 64-bit kernels).

answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:51

geekosaur

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:59

0

Tuxera NTFS for MAC Should be what your looking for to read and write to NTFS Partitions.

answered Mar 05 '11 at 20:59

jamason1983

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I don't want to pay 25 EUR just to write on NTFS. – Fábio Perez Mar 05 '11 at 21:03

Which is the best file system to use in an external hard drive?

4 Answers4