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exFAT or NTFS on mac?

I

insignificantMB

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 24, 2008
72
0
Lakers!
I just purchased a 400 GB WD mypassport essential.
I have windows vista on my PC, when I check the format of the drive on vista, it says its on the default, NTFS.
For some reason, however, I cant transfer my 1080p quality movies that are over 4gb into it...(a problem that should only occur in FAT32 format.?)
I can format the harddrive to exFAT, but I am dont know if itll work with my mac..?
I have paragon on my macbook pro so NTFS works.

But yea, my question is just if exFAT will work on my mac laptop. Or if there is any way i can get the NTFS format to take files larger than 4gb.
 
B

bstreiff

macrumors regular
Feb 14, 2008
215
2
exFAT is only supported on XP32 (with a hotfix), Windows CE 6.0, and Vista SP1. There is also apparently some work done to get support on Linux.

Nobody seems to have written an OS X driver yet.

insignificantMB said:
For some reason, however, I cant transfer my 1080p quality movies that are over 4gb into it...(a problem that should only occur in FAT32 format.?)
Click to expand...

Nope. Unless you're using 64k clusters (which AFAIK is not the default), FAT32 tops out at 2GB files.
 
I

insignificantMB

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 24, 2008
72
0
Lakers!
bstreiff said:
exFAT is only supported on XP32 (with a hotfix), Windows CE 6.0, and Vista SP1. There is also apparently some work done to get support on Linux.

Nobody seems to have written an OS X driver yet.



Nope. Unless you're using 64k clusters (which AFAIK is not the default), FAT32 tops out at 2GB files.
Click to expand...

Thanks.
Does that mean I should reformat and choose 64 kilobytes as my allocation unit size??
Also, what drawbacks would that present?
 
B

bstreiff

macrumors regular
Feb 14, 2008
215
2
insignificantMB said:
Thanks.
Does that mean I should reformat and choose 64 kilobytes as my allocation unit size??
Also, what drawbacks would that present?
Click to expand...

My bad. The 2GB limit was FAT16.

FAT32 is still limited to 4GB files, which still won't solve your problem. NTFS is the way to go.

How are you transferring files to your drive to get this problem? Are you getting some sort of error message?
 
micsaund

micsaund

macrumors 6502
May 31, 2004
364
0
Colorado, USA
I use the MacFUSE + NTFS-3g driver and it works fine for writing to a USB drive, but it can be very slow.

I wish that MS would just release the specs for exFAT, but we all know where it'll be a cold day before that happens. FAT and FAT32 are just too limited in the modern days of multi-gigabyte files.

Anyway, I haven't found an optimal solution that's easily workable between OSX and Winbloze, but NTFS is passable.

Mike
 
B

bstreiff

macrumors regular
Feb 14, 2008
215
2
micsaund said:
I wish that MS would just release the specs for exFAT, but we all know where it'll be a cold day before that happens. FAT and FAT32 are just too limited in the modern days of multi-gigabyte files.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it'd be nice if there was a freely-implementable cross-platform filesystem that isn't FAT32 (with its fragmentation issues, and its filesize limitations, etc) that everything actually supported out-of-the-box.
 
kahlil88

kahlil88

macrumors member
Apr 6, 2009
54
0
Mendocino, CA
bstreiff said:
Yeah, it'd be nice if there was a freely-implementable cross-platform filesystem that isn't FAT32 (with its fragmentation issues, and its filesize limitations, etc) that everything actually supported out-of-the-box.
Click to expand...
The problem is that Apple and Microsoft are afraid they won't be able to keep folks dependent on their operating systems if they increase interoperability. There should be free filesystem drivers for ext3 for Mac OS X (not sure about Windows, since it's not Unix).
 
G

gordon1234

macrumors 6502a
Jun 23, 2010
580
190
micsaund said:
I use the MacFUSE + NTFS-3g driver and it works fine for writing to a USB drive, but it can be very slow.

I wish that MS would just release the specs for exFAT, but we all know where it'll be a cold day before that happens. FAT and FAT32 are just too limited in the modern days of multi-gigabyte files.

Anyway, I haven't found an optimal solution that's easily workable between OSX and Winbloze, but NTFS is passable.

Mike
Click to expand...

Actually, unlike NTFS, exFAT was designed specifically with interoperability in mind, and the format can be licensed from Microsoft (for a price).
 
balamw

balamw

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
19,366
979
New England
Last edited:
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