Hi all. I recently purchased a 2 TB hard drive for my mac book pro (osx v10.6.8) as my drive was almost full. The hard drive is WD my passport for mac. I also have a samsung smart tv which I have used with friends hard drives to watch video files, so was eager to do this myself, I currently use a HD cable from my mac book to the hd port. After uploading some video files to the hard drive my smart tv recognised the drive but would not play any media. After looking at some posts online I reformatted from 'Mac OS Extended (journaled)' to 'Mac FAT' which worked fine for small media files but a lot of files, for example blu rays, are over 4GB and can not be transferred. After further investigation and a lot of confusing reading of partitioning(??) I reformatted again to 'ExFAT' Hurrah - It is compatible with my mac book and my smart tv and I can transfer files greater than 4GB. My issue is, I intend to use my hard drive to store other types of files such as word/pages docs, powerpoint presentations and to back up my photographs. Will exFAT format affect/limit this?? I haven't found much info on ExFAT, what are the disadvantages?? I am not very tech minded , thanks in advance for your help
exFAT is a decent file system that gives the user cross platform compatibility. It's an old file system that lacks some of the features of newer file systems but for basic data storage its ok.
I see , what sort of features am I missing out on by using exFAT? ---------- thanks for the feedback Though in reference to your wiki quote I am not very tech minded so a lot of that did not make much sense.
Here's a good read on the various file systems. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-file-system-ntfs,3166-2.html I think basically it lacks, journaling, it fragments quite easily. storing metadata (data about data), apps like Aperture require this, on the fly compression etc.
In addition to maflynn's post. You cannot use it for TimeMachine. It does support permissions via ACL (access control lists). But for basic storage of files, it will be fine.
As said it does fine for basic storage needs. It is not a robust file system so make sure you have a backup of the files on it.