#1 ·
Hi there,
I’m not entirely sure if this is the right subforum for this kind of question, so if I'm off base, I'd appreciate it if the moderators could move this thread elsewhere.
Well, the title pretty much says it all.
I’ve got a MacBook Air and a LaCie Porsche design 1 TB External Hard Drive. Right now, the drive is formatted as NTFS because I actually picked it up a little while before I got my Mac. As most of you probably know, dealing with different formats and compatibility issues can be a real headache.
What I really need is an External Hard Drive that lets me move files back and forth between two different operating systems. NTFS is strictly for Windows; my Mac can see it, and I can pull files off it, but I can't save anything new onto the drive.
On the flip side, a macOS format is strictly for Mac, and a PC won't even be able to read it.
That leaves exFAT as an option. It doesn't have those compatibility headaches, and it doesn't have any file size limits (at least not any that would affect me). Most of what I'm storing is just photos, some music, and various documents.
The thing that's making me hesitate is that I've heard people claim exFAT isn't very stable and that you might risk losing data from the drive. That's something I definitely want to avoid. I realize no format is ever 100% foolproof, but apparently, exFAT is considered somewhat risky.
So, what do you guys think? Has anyone had good luck using exFAT? Also, is it possible to split the External Hard Drive into two partitions—maybe 500GB as NTFS and 500GB as HFS?
I remember when I first set up the drive, it actually gave me an option to decide how much space to allocate to the Mac versus the PC, so it seems like it might support that kind of setup.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 😁
I’m not entirely sure if this is the right subforum for this kind of question, so if I'm off base, I'd appreciate it if the moderators could move this thread elsewhere.
Well, the title pretty much says it all.
I’ve got a MacBook Air and a LaCie Porsche design 1 TB External Hard Drive. Right now, the drive is formatted as NTFS because I actually picked it up a little while before I got my Mac. As most of you probably know, dealing with different formats and compatibility issues can be a real headache.
What I really need is an External Hard Drive that lets me move files back and forth between two different operating systems. NTFS is strictly for Windows; my Mac can see it, and I can pull files off it, but I can't save anything new onto the drive.
On the flip side, a macOS format is strictly for Mac, and a PC won't even be able to read it.
That leaves exFAT as an option. It doesn't have those compatibility headaches, and it doesn't have any file size limits (at least not any that would affect me). Most of what I'm storing is just photos, some music, and various documents.
The thing that's making me hesitate is that I've heard people claim exFAT isn't very stable and that you might risk losing data from the drive. That's something I definitely want to avoid. I realize no format is ever 100% foolproof, but apparently, exFAT is considered somewhat risky.
So, what do you guys think? Has anyone had good luck using exFAT? Also, is it possible to split the External Hard Drive into two partitions—maybe 500GB as NTFS and 500GB as HFS?
I remember when I first set up the drive, it actually gave me an option to decide how much space to allocate to the Mac versus the PC, so it seems like it might support that kind of setup.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 😁