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What is the best filesystem to use cross-platform (Linux, Windows, OS X) which supports disk sizes of at least 2TB and file sizes >4GB?

I'm planning to use it on a USB drive on different computers.

Are there any filesystems that can be used on all the named OSes without installing additional drivers?

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  • More about the environment? Read write? One machine? Network shares? May 19, 2013 at 19:22
  • read/write support would be great. used as a usb-drive on different computers.
    – Zulakis
    May 19, 2013 at 19:22

2 Answers 2

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Look at "OS support" on the Comparison of filesystems page on Wikipedia. This lists OS support by file system.

As you can see, there is no file system that is covers all OS platforms, the closest being FAT16. FAT32 is a close 2nd, requiring 3rd party driver support for z/OS.

Since you require read/write support and large files and file systems, the best option would be NTFS. Obviously, Windows OSs support NTFS. Modern Linux kernels (2.2+) can read and write NTFS natively. OS X supports reading NTFS natively and writing with NTFS-3G.

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    I'd like to propose exFAT as another solid option, mainly because getting Linux to read/write exFAT is easier than getting OSX to read/write NTFS. Jun 8, 2013 at 2:19
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    @JoelESalas Agreed. exFAT works out of the box with OSX and Windows, and on Ubuntu all that is required is a simple sudo apt-get -y install exfat-utils exfat-fuse
    – user72923
    Jun 15, 2014 at 20:03
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    I would avoid exFAT. There's no backup of the file allocation table like FAT32 has; with the lack of journaling, one unsafe removal, or system freeze, during a write operation is going to hose the entire drive.
    – joe
    Sep 16, 2014 at 15:50
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    +1 for the link to NFTS-3G. I didn't know there was an open-source NTFS driver for Mac OS. Mar 14, 2016 at 19:38
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    @keltari while Linux 2.2+ has limited write support - see Linux can reliably read NTFS and can overwrite existing files, but the Linux kernel can’t write new files to an NTFS partition., an excerpt from this answer, which also explains how linux reads / writes to NTFS in modern times. it's definitely not the kernel driver though. Oct 21, 2016 at 19:25
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exFAT is now supported as R&W by Android (via the Linux kernel), macOS, and Windows. I believe that that amount of support is able to be reasonably construed as support by every important OS.

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