EXFAT?

[Nick Morrison]

Who's using EXFAT? Any pros? Cons?

Pros are that it seems to work with both PC and MAC, but cons are we've started to hear that...like other "fat" based formats...it may not be as stable as more modern configurations (such as Mac formatted).

Love to hear what the community thinks, as how drives are formatted is obviously a major part of the media management workflow.

 

[Benedict Heinzl]

There already was a thread like this:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?84419-ExFat-is-it-good-for-external-HDD-s

 

[Kevin Marshall]

I posted in that first thread last year, I can update with my experience here. The 2TB WD Black I have for general storage on my dual boot (Win7/ML) tower has been exFAT since November, and hasn't had any problems. I've used exFAT on G-Drives and Seagate USB 3.0 drives for productions with no ill effects, and I format the Sandisk SSDs I use for my BMC as exFAT - again without issue. My flash drives are also all exFAT. I intend to keep using it for any cross-platform needs.

 

[AndreasOberg]

Good thread. I have used Mac HSF instead for now and used MacDrive, but the journals may be lost if the drive disconnects.
ExFat would be great if its stable enough to use.
/Andreas

 

[AndreasOberg]

Argg. I have some VERY bad experiences with MacDrive recently. It caused bluescreens and corrupted my harddrive twice in a row when I tried to work with Lightroom on it. Could of course be the harddrive not working but I think its MacDrive since others are reporting similar results.

I'm going to try to use ExFat instead for photos since I need the data to work both on pc and on Mac for now.

/Andreas

 

[Adam Beck]

I've had mixed results, but still use it.

One of the issues I've had in the past is some PC's would transfer as USB 2 speeds using an esata G-Raid drive. Other PC's would transfer at much, much higher speeds with the same drive. The drive was reformatted and now it works correctly on all my PC's. I've never lost any data from the problem.

I've not had any issues on the MAC, and I had formatted the drives on a PC.

All in all, I will keep using exFAT.

 

[AndreasOberg]

I studied the file formats more in detail and I would warn against exFAT. It's not meant to be used for harddrives but for flashdrives.

It has one main weakness as I understand it. The other formats like FAT32, NTFS, HFS has the File Allocation Table in several places while exFAT has it only ONE place. It means if there is a problem with this table then you may not be able to recover the drive. This is the most likely to happen if you for example unplug a cable by mistake or similar which really happens with external drives. They even made a new version which is more secure called TexFat, however this one is almost not supported yet.

After trying MacDrive and Paragon on PC I had VERY bad experienced corrupting the drive multiple times, bluescreening the computer and having 10x speed decrease in transfer. So I will never use these tools for anything serious like working from them.

Conclusions:
- Don't use exFAT as work drives. They should be perfectly fine for transfering data. For example if you copy from your workdrive to a transfer drive and then to PC.
- Don't use MacDrive or Paragon unless you tested it VERY much and found it to be stable for your hardware. I think they may be stable in some situations.
- Use NTFS on pc and HFS on Mac. Transfer with exFAT.

Best
/Andreas

 

[Olivier Madar]

I agree with Andreas conclusion :
mac drive made me loose some disk last time, and i have to go Mac and PC way all the time. With no more than 2 gigas hard drive, you could go NTFS (Mac read them), but if it is more than 2, you are done ! The only way to go is exfat, and you have to format it on Mac (not on PC) if you want it to readable by Mac and PC.


Olivier