Which file system is the best choice when formatting a USB flash drive that you plan to use on both a Mac and PC?

Answer 1

For me, and for what I have researched all over the internet, the best option would be the NTFS file system.

Doing this, you will be able to attach your external hard drive to any Windows computer without any problem, and for Macintosh, as I did, you can download a little free driver from (http://www.ntfs-3g.org/) in order to let your Mac OS X write on your NTFS disk.

It is easier to have this driver installed on your Mac, than install the driver in all the Windows computer you want to copy files from it.

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Answer 2

I will use FAT32. Keep in mind, many technology experts will disagree. But let's stick to your requirement now, CROSS PLATFORM COMPATIBILITY. I presume that you just want to backup files to the external drive. Maybe shuffle between MAC running OSx and PC running Windows XP or newer. Plug it to USB port and let the computer do it's thing. Typical home or office user, right ? You don't have large files like videos, movies that is over 4000Mb or 4Gb. That is just for one file. When you search for the external drive, it is mounted and accessible. FAT 32 is the solution for you. However, you need to be aware of the following: 1. FAT32 is slicing the drive into small chunks of 64Kb sized pidgeon holes. When you have small documents that is less than 64Kb, it will still consume 64Kb of disk space. If you have lots of small files, it will always consume disk space in chunks of 64Kb or multiple chunks of 64KB, making this file system not efficient. 2. NTFS is more efficient, however, you will have to deal with NTFS permissions. This refers to what the end user can do to the contents of the external drive. This is the main reason why I am not recommending NTFS. You need to set this properly and could make things more complicated than it is necessary for simple backup purposes. You may need to plug this external drive to not just 2 computers that you own today, but to a friend or neighbor's computer. Remember, this is your backup, you maybe in a situation that you need to access files from this backup and find yourself not being able to because the user do not have the right permissions. I hope my non-techno reasoning can help you decide. So you know where I am coming from, I am an Engineer by education and IT professional of 25+ years.

Answer 3

OSX can natively read and write to FAT filesystem drives. It can read from, but not write to, NTFS drives.

There are reasons, especially for large drives, that you might want to use NTFS anyway and get a third-party add-on for the Mac, but for a flash drive, it's probably simplest to just use FAT.