Resolved ExFat External Drive - Permissions

Not that it entirely helps this problem but I would never use exFAT for a drive this large. The format works great for smaller things like thumb drives but runs into many issues when you hit the 1TB+ range. Permission problems, corrupted files, etc. It's simply not a format that was designed for large scale drives.

Personally I would try and re-format it but I know that's a lot of stuff to transfer (I see it says over 2TB used) off and back on again. Again, this is just my opinion and experience but chances are it's what is causing your problem.

AcesHigh87 said:

Not that it entirely helps this problem but I would never use exFAT for a drive this large. The format works great for smaller things like thumb drives but runs into many issues when you hit the 1TB+ range. Permission problems, corrupted files, etc. It's simply not a format that was designed for large scale drives.

Personally I would try and re-format it but I know that's a lot of stuff to transfer (I see it says over 2TB used) off and back on again. Again, this is just my opinion and experience but chances are it's what is causing your problem.

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tbh one of the benefits for me of exFAT is on larger drives, if you want a drive thats both mac and pc compatible but has files bigger than 4 gigs its the only choice. ive never had a problem with it, ive a 2Tb drive with all of my movies on it, streaming to lots of devices and theres no problems.

madeirabhoy said:

tbh one of the benefits for me of exFAT is on larger drives, if you want a drive thats both mac and pc compatible but has files bigger than 4 gigs its the only choice. ive never had a problem with it, ive a 2Tb drive with all of my movies on it, streaming to lots of devices and theres no problems.

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There are options for having NTFS write permission on a mac as well as Mac OS Extended on windows. I work at a post production studio and we house over 40 different external hard drives at any given time in a mac and windows environment. We never format to exFAT because in the past the constant ejection and mounting of the drives to different machines caused files to become corrupt and drives to exhibit behaviours similar to the ones the OP is discussing.

AcesHigh87 said:

There are options for having NTFS write permission on a mac as well as Mac OS Extended on windows. I work at a post production studio and we house over 40 different external hard drives at any given time in a mac and windows environment. We never format to exFAT because in the past the constant ejection and mounting of the drives to different machines caused files to become corrupt and drives to exhibit behaviours similar to the ones the OP is discussing.

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there are, but i had problems twice and twice bitten....admittedly i think i was unlucky, but at different times i tried both parragon and tuxera, as i wanted to share a drive between bootcamp and os x with some big files.

cant remember what way round it was but on one of them i was copying a big file and it came up an error. i restarted my computer and the drive was gone. had to take it to work's IT deparment, they said for some reason all of the directory info was gone but were able to recover everything.

using the other app, what happened was very weird and very random, and it would be understandable for people thinking i must just have had a mad moment. i had all my 130 gigs of music on it, itunes was opened and playing fine, i quit itunes. noticed my trash bulging and without thinking hit empty trash, as it came up emptying 250000 files i thought woah, hit cancel. all of my music folder was in the trash. i didnt put it there. but admittedly its a bit weird and i could just as easily blame itunes as the NTFS drive, or even a drive problem unrelated to the NTFS mac driver.

i also got more than a few kernal panics which i wasnt used to getting.
this was round about the time that apple put NTFS drivers into OS X beta then pulled them from 10.7 (i think) due to instability and kernal panics. so from that moment i went with exFAT for both my external drives.the problem with NTFS drivers on a mac is that they are all reverse engineered as Microsoft wont license their code for the format.



unfortunately no format is perfect when you want to use a drive for mac, pc and use some files bigger than 4 gigs, but ive used exFAT for a few years now, and the only problem i have which is definitely related to how exFAT works, is my PLEX library doesnt update without me force updating. its a known issue to do with the way exFAT handles updating when files were last modified.

im not constantly ejecting my disc mind you and im not working in a serious environment.

madeirabhoy said:

there are, but i had problems twice and twice bitten....admittedly i think i was unlucky, but at different times i tried both parragon and tuxera, as i wanted to share a drive between bootcamp and os x with some big files.

cant remember what way round it was but on one of them i was copying a big file and it came up an error. i restarted my computer and the drive was gone. had to take it to work's IT deparment, they said for some reason all of the directory info was gone but were able to recover everything.

using the other app, what happened was very weird and very random, and it would be understandable for people thinking i must just have had a mad moment. i had all my 130 gigs of music on it, itunes was opened and playing fine, i quit itunes. noticed my trash bulging and without thinking hit empty trash, as it came up emptying 250000 files i thought woah, hit cancel. all of my music folder was in the trash. i didnt put it there. but admittedly its a bit weird and i could just as easily blame itunes as the NTFS drive, or even a drive problem unrelated to the NTFS mac driver.

i also got more than a few kernal panics which i wasnt used to getting.
this was round about the time that apple put NTFS drivers into OS X beta then pulled them from 10.7 (i think) due to instability and kernal panics. so from that moment i went with exFAT for both my external drives.the problem with NTFS drivers on a mac is that they are all reverse engineered as Microsoft wont license their code for the format.



unfortunately no format is perfect when you want to use a drive for mac, pc and use some files bigger than 4 gigs, but ive used exFAT for a few years now, and the only problem i have which is definitely related to how exFAT works, is my PLEX library doesnt update without me force updating. its a known issue to do with the way exFAT handles updating when files were last modified.

im not constantly ejecting my disc mind you and im not working in a serious environment.

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The last sentence there definitely could have something to do with it not working well for us and it's very possible that the OP would be fine. Then again things aren't working so something is obviously wrong.

Personally I've had quite the opposite experience as you. While I prefer to use macdrive on windows machines and have drives formatted for mac I've run paragon for over a year now on my mac without any issue. Then again, the only NTFS "drive" I use is my windows partition so it might not be as big of a concern.

As you said, there's no truly good answer regarding formatting for both systems. FAT32 still works and is stable but the file size limit and performance are major downfalls.

Strangely, for this OP, a windows machine is not even being used. I'm not sure if there is a reason exFAT was chosen since a hard drive in a mac only environment will always run better formatted for mac which sorta leaves this whole discussion of "what works for both" being a little pointless.

AcesHigh87 said:

The last sentence there definitely could have something to do with it not working well for us and it's very possible that the OP would be fine. Then again things aren't working so something is obviously wrong.

Personally I've had quite the opposite experience as you. While I prefer to use macdrive on windows machines and have drives formatted for mac I've run paragon for over a year now on my mac without any issue. Then again, the only NTFS "drive" I use is my windows partition so it might not be as big of a concern.

As you said, there's no truly good answer regarding formatting for both systems. FAT32 still works and is stable but the file size limit and performance are major downfalls.

Strangely, for this OP, a windows machine is not even being used. I'm not sure if there is a reason exFAT was chosen since a hard drive in a mac only environment will always run better formatted for mac which sorta leaves this whole discussion of "what works for both" being a little pointless.

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thats true, definitely unless theres a reason for using the drive in a non mac environment he'd be best to stick to HFS+

ZeroBeat said:

I'm using exFat because I wanted to be able to plug my hard drive (which contains my iTunes library) into any of my computers (two apple computers and a windows computer) without any problems. But it seems now I have problems. I think the only thing i can do is to re-format it to something just mac compatible.

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is one of the macs always on? if so you could use home sharing to stream to the others.


otherwise you could do waht i do, pay 30 euro for itunes match, stick all your music in the cloud and stream it from all of your computers and tablets