Dec 19, 2017 - This article explains how to install the Paragon NTFS Driver for Mac. ID 291: How to format a WD hard drive to exFAT or FAT32 file system. In the 'File System' dropdown, choose exFAT instead of NTFS. From then on, that drive should work fantastically between Mac and Windows machines. It won't work with Linux unless you install Linux's exFAT drivers, but for most people, exFAT is just about perfect.
Since the beginning of time, Macs and PCs (IBM-compatible / Intel-chip / Microsoft DOS or Windows OS) used the same or similar hardware, including for external storage, but had differences in software which made sharing of hardware between them incompatible. Even as each operating system (from Mac OS up to OSX, DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows NT) upgraded and used new disk formats, they remained different and incompatible. Other OSs like Linux and the BSDs had their own quirks, although they also sought to be able to work with DOS disks from the beginning, and can mount disks from other systems using drivers.
How to read a Mac drive in Windows Today, in a world where all machines need to be interconnected through the Internet, we still have problems with Macs reading Windows disks and vice versa. Mac OSX computers use HFS+ as its disk format while Windows today will generally use NTFS. OSX now has some support for reading NTFS formatted drives, but the support is read-only and incomplete.
Not all NTFS disks will be mountable in OSX, at least with the native NTFS support. Native support for the other filesystem type Windows has no native support for HFS+.
The only way to read an HFS+ disk is with 3rd party software. So you won't be able to mount a Mac drive and use it normally in Windows (without buying software which we'll get to). But you can use software like the free to open your drive and view folders and copy files to your Windows drive. You might have problems with filenames and some files might be corrupt.
This is not a perfect solution, and I don't recommend using it to copy an entire Mac drive over, but the software is open source and free and is a good triaging tool if you just need to access some specific files right now. You'll want to verify (take md5sums) that it's a true copy though, meaning you'll need to check the file again in OSX. You'll also lose file metadata, if you have a lot of files and that's a concern for you. You can also trial or buy software company Paragon's product 'HFS+ for Windows' which lets you mount the Mac disk in Windows and then both read and write to your HFS+ drive. Paragon also makes a driver 'NTFS for Mac' to mount a Windows NTFS disk on your Mac.
Besides Paragon, the other main commercial software is Mediafour's MacDrive. How to read a Windows drive on OSX Your Mac may be able to see your NTFS-formatted drive automatically, but not write to it. If you don't see it, you can also try 3rd party software. Mentioned above, Paragon is one commercial software provider with a driver to mount NTFS drives as both read and write. Tuxera NTFS for Mac is another commercial product (free trial, then 25 EUR).
There's also a free way to mount NTFS as read-write. You need something to add a FUSE layer to OSX, like which replaces MacFuse, which gives user software the ability to mount 3rd party filesystems when you also provid a Fuse driver for that filesystem. Once you have Fuse, you can install NTFS-3G (which itself was developed by Tuxera mentioned above).
The commercial Tuxera NTFS is supposed to be much faster than the free one. Format your new drives to be readable on both OSX and Windows The conventional wisdom is that you should format your external drives as exFAT if you want to connect them to both OSX and Windows computers. ExFAT is a relatively newer filesystem owned and controlled by Microsoft, therefore requiring a license for other companies to use and not free.
But Windows (Vista Service Pack 1 and later) and OSX support exFAT for both reading and writing, and can create volumes formatted as exFAT. But exFAT has its own issues with compatibility. Format the disk first on OSX and you may not be able to read it on Windows! Either format it from Windows or check it in Windows after formatting before using.
ExFAT also suffers from problems unmounting on OSX. ExFAT isn't a journaled filesystem and thus doesn't manage crashing or sudden unmounts well, which can allow file corruption. And each time the disk is suddenly removed (as is often the case with external USB disks) you'll have to fsck the drive again next time. This can take considerable time (an hour) before you can read your external drive in OSX again. During that time you'll see fsckexfat running. You can run it manually from the terminal: sudo /System/Library/Filesystems/exfat.fs/Contents/Resources/./fsckexfat -y /dev/rdisk2s2 (you may need to replace the /dev/).
You can also fix a 'dirty' exFAT disk in Windows then reconnect it to OSX. ExFAT doesn't support sparse files which can mean it will take up much more space if storing certain kinds of files on it. ExFAT also doesn't support hard links. This makes exFAT unsuitable for certain backup software which save copies of files not as full copies but as hard links. You won't be able to use your exFAT formatted external disk as a OSX Time Machine backup destination without some hackery. Before exFAT, removable USB disks were usually formatted as regular old FAT. FAT32 formatting is still an option from both OSX and Windows.
The main problem with FAT32 is the maximum filesize of 4 GB, which can be too small for large video files. However, if large files aren't a concern then formatting your drive as FAT is an option, which would get around the problem of incompatibility of exFAT formatting on OSX.
I've made the long overdue decision to keep backups on an external USB drive, but should I go with NTFS or exFAT for the drive? We have an all Windows household here, and although I fiddle with Linux once in a while, I can't see myself using the backup with it so NTFS wouldn't be much of a limitation. That it's a full fat journaling file system and supposedly more robust than exFAT is a point in NTFS's favour, but I also vaguely remember being told that when it breaks, it breaks real bad. Which one would be the smarter/safer choice here? Bearing in mind that it's a backup of files that are normally stored on a FreeNAS box. Are you connecting the drive to the windows machines or directly to the FreeNAS box?
I'm connecting the drive to the Windows machine. My FreeNAS box is headless, and I figure nothing gets plugged into it under normal circumstances. I didn't think about the permissions issue. For the most part it shouldn't be a problem as I'd figured I'd always be using the same windows machine, but then again it is a backup, and if things went south I would probably need to plug it into something else.
Handling permissions wouldn't be an insurmountable issue, but it would be 'one more problem'. For FreeNAS you can plug USB drive directly into FreeNAS, then you can create volume (next time you plug it in you import volume and then detach before disconnecting) - this can be done through web interface. Once attached you can either create ZFS snapshot and send it to USB volume or you can format USB drive in ZFS and use rsync.
This can be done through ssh (Putty or WSL). NTFS in FreeNAS and can be read and written on MacOS and Linux. It's also journaled. I'd only use exFAT on something that must be read on embedded systems or digital cameras or for disposable storage such as Linux bootable USB drives.
NTFS in FreeNAS and can be read and written on MacOS and Linux. It's also journaled. NTFS is readable/writable on Windows and Linux (often out of the box, without having to install ntfs-3g). It's readable on Mac OS, but not writable. Some external drive manufacturers will include Mac OS drivers for NTFS right on the hard drive so you can write. The Seagate Backup Plus drive I just bought yesterday did. Ntfs-3g is also available for Mac OS, and it's (of course) free.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/3/125393605/285570635.png)
ExFAT can be read/written by Windows or Mac, but not by Linux (if you want to stick to free software). I would definitely go with NTFS.
ExFAT is relatively fragile since it is not journaled, so if you have file system corruption, you can't recover. NTFS has robust cross-platform tools to recover a corrupt file system. Furthermore, exFAT uses only a single File Allocation Table unlike the redundancies present in NTFS and FAT32, so if that gets corrupt, you have no backup. For an external removable drive?
You don't want to have to deal with having to wait for the OS to 'finish' using the drive so you can unmount it cleanly with NTFS. And you don't want to be doing dirty cable pulls with your backup drive. Then unmount it correctly.
I'd rather deal with spending an extra 5-15 seconds unmounting my drive than having a file system that's corrupted and completely unrecoverable. ExFAT is useful for embedded systems and things that need SD cards (such as cameras) because it's a lightweight and simple file system that's easy to implement in firmware with minimal processing power. Its benefits don't really apply to computers with desktop processors, and if you have the option, use NTFS. ExFAT was specifically designed for flash drives and SD cards. Go with NTFS unless you have a good reason not to (e.g.
Writes are an issue, or you need the absolute most free space). ExFAT makes little accommodation for flash RAM. It's just small, simple and easily handled when processing power is extremely limited, and by 'limited', I mean things like the ATMega. By the time we reach Raspberry Pi, we're far and away powerful enough to do all sorts of filesystems, even full speed software RAID. ExFAT's original use case has gone, even stuff like cameras or MP3 players (what it was designed for) now have at least ARM11s in them, if not Cortex A or M series cores, all of which easily powerful enough for more modern filesystems. In terms of actually dealing with the particular needs of flash storage, it's no better or worse than NTFS is. Systems like F2FS, UBIFS, and the JFFS family work better for this use case.
As SD cards already have their own flash translation layer, they don't benefit from naive flash-block assumptions, F2FS is particularly well suited for this. ExFAT's one saving grace is that everything in the world supports it. Making Windows talk F2FS or UBIFS is decidedly non-trivial. Hell, I boot a Linux VM and network-mount UBIFS systems to expose them to the host! If my choices are only exFAT or NTFS, and I want my data to be reasonably well protected from things like accidental removal or a random USB device reset, it's got to be NTFS every time.
Every device I care about restoring backed up files to will understand NTFS. So this past weekend was a good reminder of: 'Why it's important to back up your critical data.' After a too long week at work, I thought I'd kick off a lazy Saturday morning with a big hot cup of tea and some Netflix. Turned on the desktop to see a corrupted display, and Windows wanting to check the disk for errors. Windows failing to boot. Good thing I'd just finished organising my critical data on my NAS.
Spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon tearing the system down, reseating everything sans video card and drives. System booted and onboard video was fine.
Jury rigged a testbed to.confirm. it was the video card (and yes, it was), then rushed out to pick up a new one. Thankfully, it was just the video card. Windows booted fine after that as if nothing had happened. All data intact, but it could have been worse. (Also, good thing about video card prices returning to saner levels.) Coming back on topic.
I'm going to give NTFS a try on my removable backup drive. Already formatted it and used it to shuffle some files across two systems as a test, and so far, no screaming from Windows about permissions. So that looks good. Cross platform compatibility won't be an issue. I have no Macs, and I'm unlikely to plug this unit into a Linux box. On that note, last I read NTFS support on Linux was still 'we haven't seen any problems but use at your own risk.' Is that still the case?
On that note, last I read NTFS support on Linux was still 'we haven't seen any problems but use at your own risk.' Is that still the case? That's pretty much the state of all software.
Most EULAs disclaim merchantability or fitness for purpose. Until at least Vista, a particularly crafted (or particularly corrupt) NTFS volume could blue screen a system. I had a HDD which did this, and on installing it in a USB enclosure, would reliably crash any machine it was plugged into with an ntfs.sys crash.
I really ought to have found out what was causing that and weaponised it on a USB stick. NTFS support on Linux has come a long, long way since the first read-only implementations 15 years ago. You can boot a live Linux USB and actively repair an NTFS filesystem, returning to boot Windows when you're done.