Which filesystems can be used by OS X and WinXP?

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi there,

I'm planning to buy a Mac Pro and dual-boot OS X and Win XP SP2.

Are there any file systems which can be written to and read by both OS X and Win XP? Is the only choice FAT32? Am I correct in thinking that FAT32 isn't as fast as NTFS?

I'm planning to use the system for video editing and I'm planning to build a 3.5TB 8-disk RAID5 array. Will I need to have three partitions on the array:

1 partition for use on with OS X
1 partition for use on Win XP
1 FAT 32 partition to exchange info between the two systems

Many thanks,
Jack

 

[Will_3rd]

FAT32 is pretty much the only choice unless you want mess around with command line fun or open source NTFS drivers.

Not sure on the speed difference between FAT32 and NTFS but latter is more resistant to defragmentation.

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Many thanks for the reply. FAT32 is certainly very limiting with its maximum file size of 4GB.

I've done a little bit of reading which seems to suggest that NTFS-3G is a stable, safe, fast and free way to read and write to NTFS volumes from Mac OS X (or Linux). Has anyone had any experience with NTFS-3G?

Many thanks,
Jack

 

[bigredshark]

Many thanks for the reply. FAT32 is certainly very limiting with its maximum file size of 4GB.

I've done a little bit of reading which seems to suggest that NTFS-3G is a stable, safe, fast and free way to read and write to NTFS volumes from Mac OS X (or Linux). Has anyone had any experience with NTFS-3G?

Many thanks,
Jack

Yeah, I have it working fine on here, no command line work needed to install or use. I used MacFUSE / ntfs-3g, install was painless. Can't really speak for performance, if it was awful I'd have noticed but I haven't tested it to see if it matches hfs or anything.

 

[unknowndomain]

You could use macdrive to allow windows to access HFS+