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

Question

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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?

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

4,852

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

7,134

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

12,091

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

301

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

4 Answers4