How to format an external hard drive to make it work without issues on Mac/windows

Yes EXFat is the best format if you need to use it with Windows and MacOS.

 

I still use HFS for Mac and NTFS for Windows, because exFat is not that stable. Then I use third party drivers to access NTFS on Mac and HFS on Windows.

 

I never had problems with ExFAT. I have several files on an external that are 20 gigs in size. And I need Mac and windows compatibility. And fat32 has a 4 gig limit.

 

Exfat for sure. Use it all the time.

 

If you have an external disk and you need NTFS and HFS and you think exfat is not stable. Then I think by all means, you should just get a NAS with a RAID

 

I lost over 100GB of data stored on an exFat partition when I plugged my hard disk to windows PC. I tried everything I could but I couldn't recover them.
Until now I still have no idea why that would happen but it happened.

 

That could have been caused by anything, to make a general statement that ExFat is unstable is simply not true. I was using drivers on the Pc to read Mac Formatted drives and had issues with that aswell. Ended up having to reformat the drive.

 

Use default.
Different disk size applies different block size. Larger partition requires larger block size, and vice versa.

 

But this can completely destroys my confidence on exFat.
Anyway, I give it up.

 

Both parts.

 

Problem with exfat is that not all devices support it. If you ever going to attach the drive to be part of the nas, it will be be a problem. Some nases only support ntfs and hfs+. There is no quarantees that exfat will be supported either. Some nas manufacturers provides some kind of support - if i dont remember wrong, synology offers you to buy an add-on for exfat drives.

 

formatting drive doesnt actually remove data. if you want to get rid of the data, you need to do more than just basic formatting.

new drives are always good to format fully, not just the quick format. Doing full formatting every sectors are checked.

 

FAT or exFAT.

 

I have used exFAT extensively in both OS X and Windows on the same computer, switching between the two operating systems. It was nice to have a read/write drive available to both operating systems without running any third party software. Unfortunately, initial OS support for exFAT was pretty bad on both sides, maybe beta quality at best. I had corruption issues about once every two or three weeks.

When this happened, Windows would switch to read-only mode for the exFAT drive, I assume out of fear for making things worse. OS X just merrily kept using the drive, resulting in all manner of weird problems. In OS X, Disk Utility refused to repair exFAT drives, although I could drop to the command line and fix it there. Windows CHKDSK could usually, but not always, repair the drive. I never lost a file though.

Also, none of the backup programs I used would work with the exFAT drive in any capacity. They won't back it up, nor will they accept it as a destination for backups.

However, today it is a completely different story. Same drive, same computer, but newer versions of OS X and Windows. It works very reliably now, no problems. (Backup might still not work...I haven't tried that in years.)