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I am trying to settle on a drive file format which is compatible with OSX and Windows for reading/writing 4GB+ files.

Linux support would be a bonus.

  • Using FAT is a no go since it does not support 4GB+ files.
  • NTFS - appeared good however, OSX cannot write to this format it can only
    read from it.
  • OSX Mac file formats - well, that is not going to play nice with anything but OSX is it?
  • exFAT- I heard it supports 4GB+ but there are driver issues I think on OSX?

Anyway, I can't be the first one to look for this, what are other people doing in this regard?

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OS X supports exFAT since 10.6.5. Unless you really need to support older OS X versions you can safely go with exFAT. Linux and FreeBSD might need some fuse-based driver.

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  • That's good to hear, so OSX and both Windows do not have any issues with exFAT? But Linux still does?
    – iQ.
    Jul 26, 2014 at 19:27
  • Depending on the Linux distribution you might already have the right drivers. Other distributions might need some extra work (like CentOS 6.4) I had no problems with exFAT on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I would expect that exFAT works fine with Windows since exFAT is Microsoft's own invention.
    – Martin Maciaszek
    Jul 26, 2014 at 19:33
  • Right I can see that exFat requires a restrictive licence to be implemented which is why I guess most distros' don't come with it by default, at least not kernel level support. However it seems is is quite easy to install on say Ubuntu 13.10+
    – iQ.
    Jul 27, 2014 at 10:22

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