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Is exFat best for all external drives

I

Inpresmoj

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 31, 2019
20
5
Apple tec support have advised me that even though im only using my external drives in apple devices, ie imac 2020, soon to arrive macbook air 2020 that I should format in exFat as its designed for external drives. I’ve got a 250G ssd thumb drive which is used daily for small data transfers and a couple of 1TB mechanical hard drives for backup used monthly.

I was going to go with APFS for the SSD and mac os extended for the mechanical drives as this seems to be the best options from the research ive done, i want the safest option.
 
That's bad advice. Exfat doesn't support journaling. Unless you will need to mount the drive in Windows at some point, native Apple formats are best.
 
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||\|| said:
That's bad advice. Exfat doesn't support journaling. Unless you will need to mount the drive in Windows at some point, native Apple formats are best.
Click to expand...
Exactly. I don't ever remember hearing about a device being formatted as ExFAT and being able to run software designed for Macs. Now if one partitions the drive and makes one partition ExFAT and the other either APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled), that would make more sense.
 
NO..!

The best format for external drives that are intended to be used with a Mac and store Mac-formatted data is HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled). This is particularly true if the drives are platter-based hard drives (these do not play well with APFS).

If you have a drive that you MUST share with PCs, then use a "cross-compatible" format like exfat.

But if the drives are intended to be used ONLY with the Mac ... again... use HFS+.
 
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Fishrrman said:
NO..!

The best format for external drives that are intended to be used with a Mac and store Mac-formatted data is HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled). This is particularly true if the drives are platter-based hard drives (these do not play well with APFS).

If you have a drive that you MUST share with PCs, then use a "cross-compatible" format like exfat.

But if the drives are intended to be used ONLY with the Mac ... again... use HFS+.
Click to expand...
Yes, very well stated! But as I said, if one wants to use the device either with a Windows PC also, or have a Windows OS on part of it, then one can first partition the drive, then format the Mac partition as HFS+, and the other partition as ExFat.

By the way, for the Mac partition formatted as HFS+, if one installs Catalina or Big Sur on that partition, it will be first re-formatted as AFPS. So, if you need an "area" of the device formatted as HFS+, it would be wise to make at least 2 Mac partitions. One can either initially format both of them as HFS+, or one of them as APFS, and the other as HFS+.

I recently sold a Samsung 860 EVO 500 gig SSD (purchased a Samsung 1 TB T7 SSD to replace it), and the buyer was going to use it in a Windows machine. He needed it to be formatted as NTFS Compressed. Unfortunately, Disk Utility would not do it, even though NTFS and NTFS Compressed are options (would format it as ExFat, though). Fortunately, I was able to download a trial version of the program Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon:

www.paragon-software.com

Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software

Read and write files from NTFS formatted disks on your Mac
www.paragon-software.com www.paragon-software.com

Worked flawlessly!
 
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