Best Format for performance on USB 3

[harry20larry]

I have just got a Western Digital My Passport USB 3 drive to use on my MBP Retina. I will obviously be using it on a USB 3 port.

I was wondering, is there any significance performance boost when formatting the drive. Ie, does it matter if I format it MS-DOS (fat) instead of Mac OS Extended (Journaled), or will there be significant performance decreases?

Thank you for your time

H

 

[Weaselboy]

Yes... it will be fastest if you format with Mac OS Extended (HFS+). The FAT variants (Fat32 and exFat) will be slower. If you really need Fat for PC compatibility, then you are kind of stuck, but if you don't need to use the disk with a PC then you definitely want it in HFS+.

If you are going to use it for Time Machine backup it will need to my HFS+ anyway.

 

[spoonie1972]

yup. and there's a 4gb file size limit on fat, iirc. not so good if you're moving big mkv files and the like.

 

[mattonthemoon]

yup. and there's a 4gb file size limit on fat, iirc. not so good if you're moving big mkv files and the like.

format as exFat it does not have the MS-DOS fat limitations.