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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

ExFat is it good for external HDD's?

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Danai Chutinaton

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I just discovered the ExFat file system. Its supported on both OSX and Windows so I was wondering if its a good file system to use for formatting external hard drives and using them to store R3D's. Seems like a good solution for cross platform compatible external storage since I believe FAT32 is limited to drives smaller than 1TB. Are there any disadvantages? I've read somewhere that ExFat is only suitable for formatting flash media.
 
Nope, don't do it.

I had 4 disk in exFat, they all created some kind of problems. The drives became not avalaible once in a while, so during copy it failed.
It was rare on my first drives, but on newer it became the rule.
I have one of these units right now in front of me, I can't do a single copy if it takes longer than 5 minutes. :(
 
I have a dual-boot machine that has Paragon HFS+ on the Windows partition (~$20), and NTFS-3G on the OS X partition (free). The couple of bucks is worth avoiding FAT32 for me, as well as keeps me prepared for client drives that I have no control over (also why I have a FW800 card). Paragon actually has a bundle for their Mac and Windows software, if you want better performance than NTFS-3G (only 32-bit.
 
Stick with FAT32 for external cross-platform drives.

ExFat is theoretically superior, but it seems to have problems now and then and is not as reliable. I've given up on it.
 
We tested ExFAT formatted drives by transferring large amounts of data on MacOS (Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion) and Windows 7 without any issues. Recently finished a data intensive shoot and used ExFAT as our format for USB3.0 drives and RAIDs from two separate Macbook Pro Retina Displays (one lion, one mountain lion) as DITs. Brought them back to the office, brought the data into our HPZ820 finishing station running Windows 7. That station is currently using one of the ExFat USB 3.0 RAIDs and playing back full resolution .r3d's at 5k nicely as we log footage. We'll slim the project down onto our NTFS SSD internal RAID array.

Just FYI as a point of reference for ExFAT working well for us on an important project with no issues across multiple platforms.
 
If Jeff lost hope then I won't f*ck with it LOL

I was having this conversation with someone on set.

Yeah it's a bummer that there isn't many options out there

As far as drives go I usually bust Journaled Extended on a Mac and BUY MacDrive for Windows works like a charm.
 
ExFAT is kinda funny. Some drives it works just fine. And on some drives and devices it does not seem to play nice. I have a Samsung SSD in an OWC USB3/eSATA enclosure and it works like a charm on the Mac connected by either port. On every Windows 7 PC I've connected it to, the USB3.0 interface intermittently drops connection and reconnects while sitting idle. But only when formatted as ExFat.. ??? Formatted as NTFS or FAT32, it runs just fine. So weird. And I have several other devices that don't play normal when using ExFat... Sometimes not on the Mac.

I haven't given up hope for it just yet, but I do usually avoid it unless I can test thoroughly on the systems and devices where I'll be using it. It should be the best file system for cross-platform use in these situations. But For various reasons that seem to change with devices, it sometimes just doesn't work very well.
 
I backed up to ExFAT formatted lacie quadras on a commercial earlier this year with no issue for my macs and no issue for post running avid W7s. The drives were slower (both reads and writes) by about 15% vs HFS using AJA System Test (sweep file sizes option). That was the only drawback I experienced.
 
I've settled on NFTS because most of my files end up over 2GB. I use Paragon's NTFS for Mac and it's beautiful. Can read, write and format NTFS drives/thumb drives and deliver to my Windows brethren.

Even without Paragon Macs can read NTFS so if you are sending stuff out into the blue, in my opinion it's the best catch-all.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I haven't given up hope for it just yet, but I do usually avoid it unless I can test thoroughly on the systems and devices where I'll be using it. It should be the best file system for cross-platform use in these situations. But For various reasons that seem to change with devices, it sometimes just doesn't work very well.
Click to expand...

This is crucial advice from Jeff. Test your drives with the devices you intend to use on a project, then proceed. Everything has been working great for us, but only after we checked many times over. Western Digital 1TB USB 3.0 drives have proven very reliable for us as shuttle drives between many different machines, FYI. For raided drives we used Sans Digital USB 3.0/esata enclosures with Hitachi Desktstar 3tb drives (they were a steal at the local Fry's in LA for a day).
 
I just had a situation where I needed to pull data from a Windows based VTR and Windows from the still photographers (EDIT: in addition to downloading and managing 9 cameras, straight to HFS and ExFAT drives) but deliver to Mac editing bays. I had two 6TB Graids, one was formatted HFS+ Journaled, the other I formatted ExFAT. I would pull data off the VTR onto the ExFAT drive, then plug it back into the mac to copy the data to the HFS master. Worked pretty well.
 
I'm out on location right now, and my HFS formatted 3TB G-Drives kept ending up with file system errors after transferring from my Windows machine with Paragon - I tried TeraCopy, R3D Data Manager, and even drag&drop. Luckily the backup drives are NTFS formatted, so nothing's been permanently lost, and my HFS 2TB WD Black that I've been using as a kind of tertiary backup has held up fine. I'm trying exFAT on the G-Drives now (formatted on my MBP), and seems to be going okay so far. Unfortunately the editing is being done on a Mac (w/o Paragon), so all-NTFS is not an option.

Keeping my fingers crossed...
 
Yeah I've had issues with ExFat. Same symptoms as everyone describes. Sometimes it won't show up on a PC but will for a Mac. Weird.:banghead:
 
I'm finding most of my issues with ExFAT are hardware related, or seem to be. Some drives must have firmware that doesn't play nice with ExFat filesystem parameters. That's the only explanation I can come up with that fits and I've been able to duplicate the same symptoms on multiple units of the same device. What's weird is that some of the problem devices work fine on OSX, but not on Windows, and for other devices it's the other way around.

Best advice still is to test before jumping into a real job with new hardware.
 
So I have been experimenting with ExFAT on two pairs of drives that I use for my photography and video projects. (Pair for redundant backup). The first pair is a Western Digital Elements USB 3 drive. So far no problems reading and writing on my Win7, 2011 iMac, and rMBP.

The second pair consists of Western Digital RE4 drives in Orico single drive external enclosure with USB3, eSATA, and Firewire 800. Using the eSATA connection it works perfectly with the 3 computers mentioned above. Using the USB3 connection it mounts as READ ONLY on both my OSX machines. I have not used the Firewire connection so I cannot comment on that.
 
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