Linux yes, usually. Windows no. I mean it does if you install a paid third party driver like MacDrive. But Windows has no native support for any non-MS format.
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Anyone still rocking HFS+?
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I'm a little out of date with Windows knowledge, but I do remember this issue being talked about in the past. Back then, I even thought it was perhaps a bit of a blessing. My thought: if Windows can't access other partitions/drives, it limits the chances of Windows (or Windows malware) doing something to harm the contents of those partitions/drives!
I've never been a huge Windows fan, even though it is what I was raised using. Now, I find myself occasionally using older Windows versions, as I have a few old PCs around the same era as PowerPC Macs. Sometimes I still get annoyed, but whenever I use Windows 10 or 11 at work I immediately hate it. Lol. Its very bloated off the bat. Even if you install LTSC or whatever or de-bloat the OS, I can install Debian, or FreeBSD with a full featured desktop and be under 512MB of memory usage.
Settings are all over the place and very unintuitive. Its just extremely frustrating.
You have it today from WSL... and I have an old Paragon driver that was written at Neanderthal ages for XP that I got from a Chip-CD, which still works.
With that philosophy I'd wish macOS would not be able to handle –and regularly corrupt– exFAT drives.
WSL is Linux more or less.
I'm impressed a driver written for XP still works though. Vista+ drivers seem to play better with modern Windows but a file system driver working is even more impressive.
Nonetheless, for the points of this conversation.. No native support. Paragon is a 3rd party, which I specified in order to get HFS on Windows.
I've never had this happen.
This probably goes without saying... but just in case. The one thing you can do on Windows, that you cannot do on Mac OS or anything else really, is just unplugging drives uncleanly. In Windows 2000 and above, you can typically just unplug a FAT(12/16/32) or exFAT on Windows XP+ without unmounting it first. Can't do that in the *NIX operating systems, which include macOS. If you're doing that, it'll probably get corrupted.
The only issue I've personally had with macOS involving exFAT is if I'm creating a drive to boot from, sometimes doesn't boot. Creating it on Windows works fine. This doesn't happen everytime but it does happen sometimes. Other than that, the drive would still function fine as expected for copying files.
It depends on how intensive you are using exFAT to exchange information between macOS and Windows.
I don't unplug the drive at all, just reboot on Windows and regularly the drive needs repair after a macOS session.
If I stay on Windows that never happens. On macOS you probably just won't notice the defective drive and macOS hasn't a repair routine either.
Thats possible. I don't use Windows a lot. And at home, I have a NAS. If I use a flash drive its usually for the work computers or a family member's computer or something. That said, I haven't had Windows complain to me about a drive needing to be repaired very often.
I'm curious about what actually is corrupting and what Windows is doing to fix it.
I don't know how exFAT drives get corrupted when used between Windows and macOS, the repair occurs over the CHKDSK funtion which detects orphaned cluster chains (usually quite fast when only a few errors happen) and recovers their contents to orphaned file allocations.
Unlike First Aid (which is mere a bad joke) it ist almost always successful.
If not, the orphaned cluster chains are stored in *.chk files.
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Apple overhauled the ExFAT filesystem implementation in macOS Ventura. It was a little bumpy at first, IIRC there were some cases where directory loops could occur (e.g. a folder and its parent folder have the same inode). Those were fixed in Sonoma, but the performance of ExFAT has been pretty lackluster on macOS ever since.
They even removed this function from newfs_hfs(8), that's wild. Then again, I hadn't even noticed, shows how much use it got. I don't expect APFS ever to get the optimizations for HDDs, the whole point was a clean new filesystem for SSDs without the cruft.