NTFS or APFS

[Clonetrooper]

Continuing to set up my first M1 MAC and I've added 2TB of external storage which will house most of my files and photographs and be the drive I work from with Lightroom. TBH I didn't give a thought or know anything about the file systems and dragged across all my old windows files onto the external drive. From first plugging in the drive I notice it's ExFAT format. My windows drives are NTFS.

As this drive will stay attached am I better off formatting it now to APFS before I get any further? Or do format it to NTFS and run third party software? We still have windows PC's in the house so on occasion I could be using a drive on both.

 

[mick2]

As this drive will stay attached am I better off formatting it now to APFS before I get any further? Or do format it to NTFS and run third party software? We still have windows PC's in the house so on occasion I could be using a drive on both.

These seem to be saying slightly different things.

If the drive is likely to be accessed by both Mac and Windows, keep it as exFAT. It's a perfectly fine filesystem if you're only using it to read & write data files eg photos, lightroom catalogue. It's less suitable as an OS filesystem, where journaling & frequent small writes, snapshotting etc come into play.

If the drive is going to be Mac-only - and is an SSD rather than a HDD - then APFS would be a slightly better choice than exFAT. It's native to modern macs, and has aspects (eg copy-on-write) that make it especially suitable for the way SSDs work.

Either are good choices, both are supported natively by Apple, and imo there's no need to go the NTFS-plus-3rd-party-sw route with its additional hassle and cost unless you specifically need to stay on NTFS for some other reason.