Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Share files between OS: FAT, NTFS and exFAT file systems

I want to transfer large files on a USB drive and share on different OS.

Mac OS uses HFS file system. Windows uses FAT and NTFS, and server filesystems like XFS and ZFS. Linux uses Ext2/3/4.

FAT32 files system can share between Windows, Linux and Mac, but does not allow files larger than 4GB.

NTFS can share between Windows and Linux. Mac can read but not write to NTFS. But here is an article on How to manually enable NTFS read and write in OS X [6], or Enable writing to NTFS hard drives on Mac OS X [7] (use NTFS-3G, NTFS-3G patch, and OSXFuse).

The proprietary exFAT file system is designed for Flash drive from Microsoft since Vista SP1, can read/write for Windows and Mac, but not work well for linux [5]. exFAT is supported in Mac OS 10.6.x and later, and Windows Vista/7 and later, for XP there is driver available.

No silver bullet. Let me use exFAT for now to share between windows and mac, and if use linux, install driver [5]. I don't want to worry too much about Linux, since Linux users are supposed to be savvy, and Linux support for exFAT is coming in the open source community.

[1] Can Microsoft’s exFAT file system bridge the gap between OSes?
[2] exFAT Versus FAT32 Versus NTFS
[3] Understanding File-Size Limits on NTFS and FAT
[4] The best ways to format an external drive for Windows and Mac
[5] How to enable exFAT in Ubuntu
[6] How to manually enable NTFS read and write in OS X
[7] Enable writing to NTFS hard drives on Mac OS X
[8] wiki: ExFAT

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