Shared Data Drive for Triple Boot OSX 10.10, Windows 8.1, and Ubuntu 14.04

[renegade117]

Hello,
I have (somewhat) successfully created my first triple boot Hackintosh SSD that has OSX 10.10, Windows 8.1, and Ubuntu 14.04 (I say somewhat because I am still trying to work out the issue of Yosemite running extremely slow on my i7-5930k/GTX 970 setup, but that is a separate issue). I also have a HDD split into three partitions, HFS+ for Mac data, NTFS for Windows data, and ext4 for Linux data. Although this setup works, I have been researching what it would take for creating one single partition that all three operating systems can read and write to. According to some older threads, the format would be between exFat, NTFS, and UDF. NTFS (unfortunately) seems the least limited option, though I'd much prefer ext4. Are these options still the only options? I realise that an alternate is using a NAS, which I have, but it is extremely unreliable and not my preference for accessing files the fastest. This would also not allow me to install programs to it. Second, I heard that OSX comes with native NTFS read capabilities but not writing capabilities, which would have to be enabled separately, and that the reason for this is because OSX is likely to ruin the drive when attempting to write files onto an NTFS partition. Is this still an issue as well or has some of the stability issues been fixed in Yosemite?
Thank you much for your time!

 

[Going Bald]

Hello,
I have (somewhat) successfully created my first triple boot Hackintosh SSD that has OSX 10.10, Windows 8.1, and Ubuntu 14.04 (I say somewhat because I am still trying to work out the issue of Yosemite running extremely slow on my i7-5930k/GTX 970 setup, but that is a separate issue). I also have a HDD split into three partitions, HFS+ for Mac data, NTFS for Windows data, and ext4 for Linux data. Although this setup works, I have been researching what it would take for creating one single partition that all three operating systems can read and write to. According to some older threads, the format would be between exFat, NTFS, and UDF. NTFS (unfortunately) seems the least limited option, though I'd much prefer ext4. Are these options still the only options? I realise that an alternate is using a NAS, which I have, but it is extremely unreliable and not my preference for accessing files the fastest. This would also not allow me to install programs to it. Second, I heard that OSX comes with native NTFS read capabilities but not writing capabilities, which would have to be enabled separately, and that the reason for this is because OSX is likely to ruin the drive when attempting to write files onto an NTFS partition. Is this still an issue as well or has some of the stability issues been fixed in Yosemite?
Thank you much for your time!

If the individual size of your files does not exceed the 4GB less 1byte size limit of the FAT32 file system then this is a mature file system that all of your OSs can read and write to. There is also a 2TB partition limit for the MBR partition tables required for using MSDOS FAT (FAT32).

As long as your partitions are less than 2 TB and your files are less than 4GB you will be OK with MBR/FAT32 format for the storage drive.

 

[renegade117]

Yeah, I did forget to list that as well. Unfortunately that is also way too restrictive for me. Only my solid state drive will be under 4TB and I have several files that far exceed what Fat32 can handle.

 

[Going Bald]

Yeah, I did forget to list that as well. Unfortunately that is also way too restrictive for me. Only my solid state drive will be under 4TB and I have several files that far exceed what Fat32 can handle.

Then you do indeed have a problem. ExFAT could be an answer, but it is not one I recommend as it is easily corrupted and you could lose the entire drive's data. 3rd party software like Paragon would work for Windows and OS X, but not for the Linux.
You could install the BootCamp drivers in Windows, which will allow Windows to "see" and index/read GPT+ but not write to it. OS X can see and open a file from NTFS but not write to it. Procedure could be
save it in OS X, boot Windows, open it, save it on the Windows drive, work on it, save it, boot OS X, open it and save it on the OS X drive, etc., going back and forth. Don't really like this as it is all too easy to corrupt the file between all the copying from one file structure to another.
Best thing is just keep the 2 separate and don't share files.