What USB drive filesystem works out of the box on Windows, Linux, and OS X so that, when I give a 64GB USB drive to my dad, I don't have to tell him to first type in
sudo apt-get install exfat-fuse exfat-utils ntfs-3g in the terminal, for example?
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Update 2018-05-25: Since I initially wrote this answer in 2015, exFAT has continued to grow in popularity, largely due to the similarly increasing popularity of SDXC and the need for a modern cross-platform filesystem. At least two Ubuntu flavors, Kylin (desktop) and MATE (core + desktop), include exFAT support by default as of 18.04. It's still patent-encumbered, but, then again, so is the rest of the FAT family. Some people think they can work around these patents; others have tried challenging them, with little success.
The FAT series of filesystems tends to be the most widely supported on modern day operating systems. It’s a very simple filesystem, and a basic implementation can be written quickly for any platform. FAT16 is probably the most widely supported variety, followed closely by FAT32. For a 64 GB drive, FAT32 would be ideal. As others have mentioned, the catch is that you'd need to use a third party utility to format the partition if you're using Windows because the built-in Windows utility can’t create FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB. Additionally, FAT32 can't store files larger than 4 GiB, since the size of each file is stored as a 32-bit unsigned integer. FAT32 is probably your best bet if you can tolerate the initial hassle of formatting the drive and the file size limit.
exFAT is starting to see more widespread use, particularly on mobile platforms, as it’s a standard format for large SD cards (SDXC). You'll likely find native support for exFAT on any device with an SDXC card reader. As you've noticed, some platforms—or specific versions/distros of platforms—don’t ship the drivers by default, usually because the distro chooses to avoid “non-free” software. The entire FAT family is patent-encumbered, but exFAT has the most recent patents of the group (e.g., US8321439 and US8583708), most of which won't expire for a long time. My recommendation would be to use exFAT if FAT32 is too restrictive, particularly if you’ll often be using the drive on Windows. Yes, you may need to install drivers on some Linux systems, but they are useful drivers that should probably be installed anyway, and the patent concerns are unlikely to be an issue for individual users.
Formatting the drive as UDF would overcome some of the limitations of FAT32. However, some platforms are likely to present the device to the user as an optical drive, which could be cumbersome. You’d also probably need a third-party utility to format the drive on Windows or Mac. If you go this route, make sure to use plain UDF, rather than VAT or spared. The latter two builds are for certain types of optical media and won’t work as expected on a flash drive. Allegedly, UDF doesn’t support files larger than 1GB on Linux due to a lazy fix for a security vulnerability (CVE-2006-4145)—I haven’t verified this. There’s also some evidence to indicate that Windows may outright refuse to handle non-optical media formatted as UDF, but I haven’t tested this either.
Zenexer
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I would recommend the FAT32 filesystem.
The FAT32 filesystem works out of the box on almost all OSes. Most USB flash drives come preformatted as FAT32.
You will have to make 2 partitions on the USB, and they will only be visible on Linux or Mac. This is because FAT32 can only handle 32GB partition sizes at most. In Windows, it will only show the first partition.
FAT can only handle partition sizes of 4GB, so I would not recommend it because as I said Windows will only show the first partition.
NTFS needs additional drivers on Linux and Mac, and you may run into problems with file permissions.
geek1011
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UDF is supported by most modern operating systems and does not have the severe limitations of FAT32. See the compatibility table on Wikipedia.
suriv
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FAT32 works almost on every device but but Windows only allows FAT32 partition to be 32GB. You need to format it using Linux (eg. gparted) if you want 64GB. Windows will not have any problems with reading/writing from/to that partition.
NTFS would also work but you may encounter problems with file permissions.
rav_kr
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FAT is the most widely supported partition type. Allows volumes up to 4GB and file size up to 2GB. This is also supported by most devices (like TVs, cars, etc)
FAT32 also works on all the mentioned systems, allows volumes from 512 MB to 2 TB and file size up to 4GB. As mentioned by others Windows XP only allows volumes up to 32GB.
NTFS is only supported by Windows versions based on NT (Windows 200 or Windows XP and above) and *NIX systems
I personally creates two partitions on (big enough) USB drives, so I'm sure I'll always have a way to store data if I visit a place.
algiogia
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To the first question, "What is the most 'cross-platform' high capacity filesystem?": There isn't one, but UDF would be closest if only it was more useful in non-optical formats. Excluding Windows OSes, HFS+ turns out to be pretty useful for moving across the other common platforms, Linux & OSX. (But sadly, not BSD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems).
I recently was doing a lot of bulk file transfers (terabytes) between Linux and OSX systems, and UDF or ext2 seemed the natural choices for formatting the 5tb drives I was using for the transfers. Neither was perfectly satisfactory because of differences in partition schemes and or/poor native driver support. In the end, Linux was better at writing to HFS+ (sans journaling) than OSX was at reading anything else.
To the second question: Why not just format the drive so it works right on your dad's computer?
Taryn
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