Hard drive formats

Jimmy1983 · 13 Dec 2012 at 07:55

Whats the best format to us? Ieally want cross compatibility with Windows...
NTFS / FAT or HFS+ ?

Jimmy1983 · 13 Dec 2012 at 11:42

Does exFAT allow files bigger than 4GB?

Jimmy1983 · 13 Dec 2012 at 11:53

Well Iam not sure what to do, I intend to use various external hard drives with my new mini. All that will be on the drives is photos and music well and general data etc. oh and I will probably setup Time Machine aswell.

Jimmy1983 · 13 Dec 2012 at 21:17

Doug said:
Well, the Time Machine drive will have to be on HFS+.

For everything else exFAT will do nicely.

So TM will only run on HFS+ formatted hard drives?

ic1male said:
I'm not keen on exFAT. It doesn't have redundancy like FAT32.

Sorry whatdo you mean by 'redundancy'?

Jimmy1983 · 13 Dec 2012 at 22:09

Mr_White said:
OS X will write to NTFS via a terminal command.

Arrrgg, ok. But I just want something quick and easy that I wont have to muck about with all of the time.

Jimmy1983 · 14 Dec 2012 at 10:06

Thanks, do you use Paragon yourself uniQ?

Jimmy1983 · 14 Dec 2012 at 10:43

uniQ said:
Yeah I've been using it for years and it's been absolutely flawless. There are some free options too but they aren't as stable. So for the sake of £6ish (at 50% off) to me it's not worth worrying about but if you want to try an alternative:

http://i.vishalagarwal.com/post/30387627819/ntfs-write-on-lion-or-mountain-lion

Thanks again, £6 is fine. Will give it ago. Many thanks. My only worry is it that it won't be supported in the future. I've read a couple of different versions of different software isn't now supported in Lion, and that you can't search as quick compared to HFS+