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Possible Duplicate:
Cross-platform file system

I have a rather large USB drive that I'd like to be able to use across the different machines I own. I'm having a hard time figuring out what would be the best file system to use on it to be able to read/write things from the 3 OSs I'm in contact with: Windows, Linux and Mac.

Suggestions?

Community
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Daniel
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5 Answers5

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The best choice might be Universal Disk Format. Windows XP, Mac OS, and Linux all support UDF reading and writing. UDF has good Unicode support and does not have the 4gb maximum size limit of FAT32.

I believe that NTFS is a bad choice because you cannot ensure that you will be able to install the appropriate drivers on every Mac OS computer you use. UDF is the accepted format for removable media and does not require reverse-engineered drivers on any operating system.

Just Jake
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2

This is a possible duplicate of this question, but to help the individual out, here is the information that they want.

It is possible to use NTFS with all three OSs. NTFS has a maximum file size of 16TB. There are drivers made for Linux and Mac that can allow you to read and write to an NTFS file system. If you need help finding these drivers, check out this link.

Community
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David
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1

You could use NTFS.

Windows: NTFS is built in. Most Linux distros come with NTFS-3g driver to read NTFS.
With OSX you need to get the OSX-version of NTFS-3g installed,
for that try: http://forums.applenova.com/showthread.php?t=21842&page=4

madmaze
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FAT32 is supported by all of those Operating Systems natively. The only limitation with FAT32 is that the largest single file you can store has to be less than 4GB.

Jay_Booney
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1

In Mac OS X, use the following commands to format your large (no 4Gb limit) hard drive in FAT32.

It will be readable and writable on Linux, Mac OS X et Windows.

First, identify the disk you want to format with this command:

$ diskutil list

The output is going to look a bit like this:

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *232.9 Gi   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         200.0 Mi   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Mac_HD                  39.9 Gi    disk0s2
   3:                  Apple_HFS Data                    192.6 Gi   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *1.9 Gi     disk1
   1:                 DOS_FAT_32 CORSAIR                 1.9 Gi     disk1s1

Let's assume we want to format the Corsair USB key and name it "Millenium Falcon":

$ diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk1 MBRFormat "MS-DOS FAT32" "Millenium Falcon" 1.9G

For more info:

$ man diskutil
romainl
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