Using ExFat for storage drive. How reliable is it as of today?

[Night2]

Hi everyone. I was just wondering about using exFat format on a storage drive to share between OSX and Windows.

For years I've been using a hard drive as a storage device for all my personal stuff like pictures, movies, documents, etc. and of course, with the technology changing so much, I've been moving everything to a bigger harddrive when the time is needed. Today I own a WD 1TB hard drive where almost 700 GB is used. So eventually I'll upgrade to a bigger one. Since the beginning I've been a windows user, and cause of the gap of knowledge by the time, I always used NTFS format, cause of course Fat32 has the 4 gb limitation.

2011 I change to apple, and to use this HDD I used tuxeda to read and write on it. I wasn't to happy with the experience to be honest, but since it works then eh! why not. But Last year I put together a new PC where I use both OSX and Windows. 5 months ago I tried formating this HDD to exFat, and make it an internal drive that I could read and write using both systems with no problem.

As of today I haven't got any problems that I know of. I can access my itunes playlist on both system, I can access, back up, delete, copy anything with osx and windows very well. The thing is, I have read on a lot of bad reviews about using exfat. So even if it works ok, I'm still a little bit skeptical.

So this is what I want to archive. I do a lot of video editing, and most of the time I'm doing collaborations with people who may have only osx or windows, but rarely both. So I'm thinking to format my G-Raid (this one I use for editing) to exFat, so I could use it and open different adobe projects on both systems. I already tried this (opening a project of adobe on mac and PC) and surprisingly it went well. But I can't tell if this is reliable.

Can anyone share their experience? as of today, is it reliable to use exfat or not. Also, do you think its better to format the drive on windows or mac. So far I heard for max compatibility its better to do it on windows. but all forums that talk about it are a bit old.

Thanks in advance

 

[P1LGRIM]

Hi everyone. I was just wondering about using exFat format on a storage drive to share between OSX and Windows.

For years I've been using a hard drive as a storage device for all my personal stuff like pictures, movies, documents, etc. and of course, with the technology changing so much, I've been moving everything to a bigger harddrive when the time is needed. Today I own a WD 1TB hard drive where almost 700 GB is used. So eventually I'll upgrade to a bigger one. Since the beginning I've been a windows user, and cause of the gap of knowledge by the time, I always used NTFS format, cause of course Fat32 has the 4 gb limitation.

2011 I change to apple, and to use this HDD I used tuxeda to read and write on it. I wasn't to happy with the experience to be honest, but since it works then eh! why not. But Last year I put together a new PC where I use both OSX and Windows. 5 months ago I tried formating this HDD to exFat, and make it an internal drive that I could read and write using both systems with no problem.

As of today I haven't got any problems that I know of. I can access my itunes playlist on both system, I can access, back up, delete, copy anything with osx and windows very well. The thing is, I have read on a lot of bad reviews about using exfat. So even if it works ok, I'm still a little bit skeptical.

So this is what I want to archive. I do a lot of video editing, and most of the time I'm doing collaborations with people who may have only osx or windows, but rarely both. So I'm thinking to format my G-Raid (this one I use for editing) to exFat, so I could use it and open different adobe projects on both systems. I already tried this (opening a project of adobe on mac and PC) and surprisingly it went well. But I can't tell if this is reliable.

Can anyone share their experience? as of today, is it reliable to use exfat or not. Also, do you think its better to format the drive on windows or mac. So far I heard for max compatibility its better to do it on windows. but all forums that talk about it are a bit old.

Thanks in advance

If you value your data at all then exFAT is one of the worst file systems you can use - Wikipedia

There is very little resilience and the slightest error means that you can lose everything.

Using it with two (or more) operating systems increases the risk of errors.

 

[Night2]

If you value your data at all then exFAT is one of the worst file systems you can use - Wikipedia

There is very little resilience and the slightest error means that you can lose everything.

Using it with two (or more) operating systems increases the risk of errors.

But still, if you go to the official page of G-Technologies, they recommend exFat to use it on both systems. Also, the SDXC memory cards format is exFat, since a volume in Fat32 can't go bigger than 32 GB, and this type of card go around 256GB, and also the read and write speed go even faster than the SDHC.

Anyway, thanks for your opinion.