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FAT32, you have been pwned!

M

Michael CM1

macrumors 603
Original poster
Feb 4, 2008
5,682
277
OK, not really, but FAT32 as the best sharing file system between Macs and PCs is no more.

I bought a My Passport 250GB drive this weekend (for $89!) and wanted to have it available to use between both Macs and PCs. It came formatted as FAT32 just like my flash drives have, so I started copying files over.

Problem is I have a disc image I need stored there that is 7+GB. FAT32's file limit is 4GB. Well, there goes that. I went with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and I'll just have to let it sit there and not do everything I was hoping for.

So basically, the discussion is: is there (or will there be) a new file system for disks (not CDFS) that allows interopability and very large files? If HD videos ever become downloadable, they will top 4GB (especially in 1080p). I know this isn't much of a big deal with networks, but I'd love to port this little drive around to other places that may or may not have Macs.
 
A cross platform format, probably not anytime soon. Although, they may try to adopt UDF for some drives - that may work at some point.
 
I have a feeling that nobody's going to work *too* hard on it because of the networking cop-out. I just wish someone could've thought about this a few years ago since many many files are more than 4GB when you get into disk images and HD video. Why can't computers be perfect? :)
 
You could try Paragon or 3G (NTFS-RW) for Mac, or MacDrive (HFS+-RW) for Windows. IMO MacDrive works better, but do whatever you like.
 
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