Internal exFAT drive

[341328]

Hi

I have an SSD which has two partitions: Mac OS and Windows 7.

I also have another internal hard drive 750GB. I took out the DVD drive and put this in.

I am considering formatting this drive as exFAT so that both Windows 7 and Mac OS can both read and write to this drive (without the need to partition the drive).

Mac OS lets me format this internal drive as exFAT but Windows 7 won't let me format it probably because it is an internal drive. Note: I'm not going to be booting from this drive.

Can anyone see any issues in my formatting it as exFAT?

Thanks in advance.

 

[341328]

Seems to work...

So I went ahead and formatting the internal drive as exFAT.

Seems to work great! Full read and write on both Windows 7 and Mac OS.

Brilliant! Now both OSes can share the drive without having to partion.

I'll keep you posted of any issues if I experience them in the future.

 

[balamw]

FWIW I ran into some FS corruption with an external 2TB drive I had formatted exFAT. I was using it alright for a week or so moving stuff from my Mac to a PC, but one time I moved it back he PC called up CHKDSK. Thus ended my experiment with exFAT.

I hope you have better luck with it than I did.

B

 

[341328]

@balamw

Thanks for the info! Crap, I hope I don't have issues. I wish I knew this from you a few hours earlier. :-(

I assume you didn't have both the Mac and PC accessing the hard drive at the same time?

 

[balamw]

I assume you didn't have both the Mac and PC accessing the hard drive at the same time?

No, of course not, and I ejected it properly before removal from both systems.

NOTE: I didn't actually lose any data, but it didn't give me warm fuzzies that the chkdsk was called for so quickly.

B

 

[chrisnwb]

rturner2 (or anyone else with exFAT-partitioned internal drives),

How is it working now?

I just set up an exFAT internal drive on my macbook's optibay, and within a day, Windows 7 (via boot camp) failed to recognize the partition. At first, while the drive didn't have data yet, Windows can access the partition. From OS X, I then copied data over to the partition and on my next Windows bootup, gone--it was asking to initialize.

I was having doubts using 3rd-party NTFS drives on OS X, but with this recent exFAT experience, I'm having 2nd thoughts with exFAT (internal drive) now.

 

[Grannyville7989]

FWIW I ran into some FS corruption with an external 2TB drive I had formatted exFAT. I was using it alright for a week or so moving stuff from my Mac to a PC, but one time I moved it back he PC called up CHKDSK. Thus ended my experiment with exFAT.

I hope you have better luck with it than I did.

B

I had a similar sort of issue when I had an internal partition formatted as FAT32 that I accessed from OS X and Windows. Every now and again, when I access the FAT32 partition from OS X and then boot into Windows, Windows would throw up the CHKDSK screen during start-up. I was never quite sure why it did that and it bugged me. Could it be related to your CHKDSK call with your exFAT drive?

 

[shortcut3d]

Why not use MacDrive Pro? It works great for reading Mac OS Extended Journaled partitions.

 

[murphychris]

exFAT is well suited for flash media such as USB sticks and memory cards, for a smaller number of large files (think photos and movies); whereas NTFS is better suited for many files of any size. For an internal disk you should use NTFS or HFS+. If I had to pick between the two I'd pick NTFS for important data, and HFS+ for performance.