There's a risk of data corruption any time you disconnect a disk on a Mac without ejecting/unmounting first, regardless of format.I heard that exFAT is risky in that if you disconnect without ejecting first, there can be a loss of data. Does that mean Mac OS Extended (Journaled) would not have the same problem?
Does that mean you can get away with this on a Windows computer but not on a Mac?Best practices on a Mac has always been to eject the volume(s) before physically disconnecting the device however its formatted. While Macs can read and write to ExFat disks they can’t boot from them. The should only be used if you need the disk to be used with a Windows machine.
Pavlo recommends properly ejecting if you’re using a Mac, because it always uses the write cache feature.
So what bad stuff could happen if you pull the thumb drive out while you’re copying a file to it, or while the write cache is doing something in the background?
The first possibility is that the file you were copying to the USB drive gets corrupted (although chances are the original file on your computer would still be okay). After that, there’s the chance that another file on that thumb drive gets corrupted, too.
The biggest problem would be if you were to corrupt the USB drive itself—the file system metadata could be ruined, meaning the drive wouldn’t know where things are stored.
Tuxera NTFS for Mac ($20) is much better for the task, if you need to write to NTFS frequently. I have found, however, that reformatting flash drives to another file system will destroy their performance permanently. I'd leave NTFS to hard drives.Would using Mounty be a better alternative to exFAT?
However there are stories about data corruption using Mounty:
It works! It has an extremely simple interface, gets out of your way and just lets you write to NTFS on a Mac. Paragon NTFS for Mac has a much fancier interface (it tries to do too much); I believe it costs more and the customer support with Paragon just isn’t as good.Thank you. How is Tuxera much better for the task?