MacRumors Forums. Forums Macs Mac Accessories. FAT32 vs Windows NTFS vs Mac HFS vs exFAT for all my external hard drives & backups. Discussion in 'Mac Accessories' started by Sossity, Dec 17, 2012. But what I am asking is what does anybody suggest that I use for my external hard drives & backups? But Windows (Vista Service Pack 1 and later) and OSX support exFAT for both reading and writing, and can create volumes formatted as exFAT. But exFAT has its own issues with compatibility. Format the disk first on OSX and you may not be able to read it on Windows! Since the beginning of time, Macs and PCs (IBM-compatible / Intel-chip / Microsoft DOS or Windows OS) used the same or similar hardware, including for external storage, but had differences in software which made sharing of hardware between them incompatible. Even as each operating system (from Mac OS up to OSX, DOS to Windows 3.1 to Windows NT) upgraded and used new disk formats, they remained different and incompatible. Other OSs like Linux and the BSDs had their own quirks, although they also sought to be able to work with DOS disks from the beginning, and can mount disks from other systems using drivers. How to read a Mac drive in Windows Today, in a world where all machines need to be interconnected through the Internet, we still have problems with Macs reading Windows disks and vice versa. Mac OSX computers use HFS+ as its disk format while Windows today will generally use NTFS. OSX now has some support for reading NTFS formatted drives, but the support is read-only and incomplete. Not all NTFS disks will be mountable in OSX, at least with the native NTFS support. Native support for the other filesystem type Windows has no native support for HFS+. The only way to read an HFS+ disk is with 3rd party software. So you won't be able to mount a Mac drive and use it normally in Windows (without buying software which we'll get to). But you can use software like the free to open your drive and view folders and copy files to your Windows drive. You might have problems with filenames and some files might be corrupt. This is not a perfect solution, and I don't recommend using it to copy an entire Mac drive over, but the software is open source and free and is a good triaging tool if you just need to access some specific files right now. Nintendo 64 emulator for mac os x. You'll want to verify (take md5sums) that it's a true copy though, meaning you'll need to check the file again in OSX. You'll also lose file metadata, if you have a lot of files and that's a concern for you. ![]() ![]() You can also trial or buy software company Paragon's product 'HFS+ for Windows' which lets you mount the Mac disk in Windows and then both read and write to your HFS+ drive. Excel database engine for mac on sasuke. Paragon also makes a driver 'NTFS for Mac' to mount a Windows NTFS disk on your Mac. Besides Paragon, the other main commercial software is Mediafour's MacDrive. How to read a Windows drive on OSX Your Mac may be able to see your NTFS-formatted drive automatically, but not write to it. If you don't see it, you can also try 3rd party software. Mentioned above, Paragon is one commercial software provider with a driver to mount NTFS drives as both read and write.
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