exFAT?

I couldn't find much mention on here or on the Internet even of using exFat as a file system to share information between Macs and PC's but I've been playing with it today with good results so far. I take it, it is a new capability of OS X?

I formatted a GUID disk with Disk Utility as exFAT and both OS X and WIN 7 via Boot Camp seem very happy to read and write to it. The performance seems quite good as well.

Any downsides to this approach versus something like MacDrive (which I have already had several problems with)?

Ryan

Here is a screenshot from what it looks like in Win 7, going to boot back to OS X and take one from there.

Here is from OS X. Perhaps it is something they put in the newest OS X builds with the 2010 Mac Pros? I've got a 2010 Hexcore.

Well with a "kids do not try this at home" warning, I'm actually using exFAT to share, not only my iTunes media files between by Win 7 and OS X but my actual iTunes database. I can see I may run into some issues down the road but it is working so far...what I have done is...

1) Move all my iTunes media to the exFat partition
2) Point iTunes in Win7 and OS X in Preferences to the exFAT media Location
3) In OS X, Let it Rebuild it's Index, (It did seem to be slower to index on exFAT maybe??)
4) Close iTunes, Move, it's XML and Database files from my user folder to a new folder on the exFAT drive.
5) Use the "ln -s" command to create a symbolic link to the new location
6) delete the old database files
7) reboot the in Win 7 and use the brand new MKLINK /J command create symbolic links in windows to point Windows 7 itunes from "My Music" to the same location on exFat. delete the old database files

So basically now when I boot back and forth from Win 7 and OS X iTunes seems to remember me exactly the same as where I left off. Or that's my theory anyway...going to take some more testing!

pastrychef said:

How did you get exFAT to show up as a format option in Disk Utility? Thanks.

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Other than pick GUID as a partition type and have a 2010 Mac Pro, I didn't do anything special. The drive I used for the test was the Western Digital 1TB Black that shipped with the Mac.

I was just in there hunting around for different options. In my last attempt at trying to get NTFS and HFS on the same drive I managed to completely corrupt the HFS partition and am still trying to get everything restored from backup! No pain no gain I guess...

pastrychef said:

Hmm... If you have time, do you think you can check the version of Disk Utility that you have? I'm running OS X 10.6.4 (10F569) and Disk Utility 11.5.1 (298.1).

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Yes mine looks to be newer. I'm at 10.6.4 and 11.5.2 (298.4). Oh and I can confirm that I managed to answer this question by rebooting from Win 7 to OS X while I had over 20 iTunes downloads queued up in Win 7 on an exFAT partition and they all kept going on in OS X soon as soon as iTunes started....quite nifty.

Ryan

Just an FYI that exFAT partitions do not seem to be able to be backed up via Time Machine, so another option will be needed for that... I tried Lacie's Silver Keeper and that didn't work either...so I maybe backing up exFAT from Windows at this rate.

Also be cautious will small files. I moved over a folder with an icon library with 300,000 16px-128px icon files and it not only expanded greatly in size in disk space over HFS (probably due to a much larger cluster size?) but finder took quite forever to delete them all for me. I'm thinking larger video files would be a more ideal exFAT file type and is more how I am using it now.

In fact, I have now struck out at every single back up solution I have tried. There are a couple that will let you back up to an exFAT partition, but nothing in either Windows or OS X seems to have any idea how to backup exFAT files.

Simplest thing I can think of is to manually script to copy the files over, but there must be some simple way to do a differential backup. It's not a complex file system, it's just I guess that it is too new for anyone to have coded for it.