Best Pen drive with 10.10.3 and Yosemite in Parralels

[deany]

Hi

We use Yosemite and W7 and XP S3 in Parralels 10

I have ordered the sandisk 64 gb USB 3.0 with up to 245 mb/s pen drive.

We have found that not all pen drives are compatable with all three OS, Mac and Windows.

Am I best formating pen drive in Win 7 to exfat?

And therefore will work on imac with above? and is exfat reliable in 2015?

thank you in advance

 

[saturnotaku]

USB thumb drives are not designed to handle the rigorous I/O of an operating system.

Use a regular SSD with an external enclosure instead.

 

[jruschme]

Hi

We use Yosemite and W7 and XP S3 in Parralels 10

I have ordered the sandisk 64 gb USB 3.0 with up to 245 mb/s pen drive.

We have found that not all pen drives are compatable with all three OS, Mac and Windows.

Are you using the pen drive to store the VMs or to share data between them?

 

[deany]

Hi

thanks for replying. Not to store OS but to share data.

thanks again

 

[yjchua95]

Hi

thanks for replying. Not to store OS but to share data.

thanks again

If it's to share data, any USB 3.0 drive formatted as ExFAT will do the job.

Note that ExFAT may not work in XP at all, and support for ExFAT is dismal in Windows 7. You'll be better off formatting the USB in HFS+, connect it to the Mac and make it accessible to the VM via Sharing Options in the VM.

 

[saturnotaku]

ExFAT is dismal in Windows 7

I've found OS X to be far more problematic in terms of exFAT support than Windows 7 or 8.1. If you want to use exFAT, it is best to format the drive using a Windows PC and selecting a cluster size of 1024.

 

[doynton]

You can download XP drivers for exFAT from MS here

On the whole though, I agree with yjchua95 if it is only for your own computers let Parallels deal with it - exFAT isn't very stable. If your files are less than 4GB then use FAT32 - it is much more reliable.

 

[saturnotaku]

If your files are less than 4GB then use FAT32 - it is much more reliable.

If the flash drive is more than 32 GB, it would be better to use exFAT or HFS+.

 

[doynton]

If the flash drive is more than 32 GB, it would be better to use exFAT or HFS+.

Why?

 

[saturnotaku]

Why?

I've found utilities that allow for formatting a large drive to FAT32 to be unreliable.