Windows and OSX Sharing Drives

[Bunford]

I have a PC, currently with a Core i5 2500K processor, 16GB RAM (soon to be increased to 32GB) and a 6870 graphics card, with a M-Audio Audiophile 2496 sound card. It is used as a audio production computer, hence the RAM being so high.

I've a couple of hard drives in my machine at the moment, usually running Windows 7 64 bit off one and OSX Lion off another. However, in the past few months, I wiped the OSX off and used it as a Windows only system.

However, I've got OSX software that I have previously bought a few years ago, such as Logic and I'm now considering reinstalling OSX up to Mountain Lion to use Logic again.

I have a couple of external drives that I use. One is a USB 500GB which I use as my music media drive. The other is my 1TB samples library drive. Both are formatted as FAT32, due to OSX able to read and write to that format, and unable to write to NTFS. I know about the 4GB limitation, but rarely have 4GB+ files.

If I reinstall OSX, am I likely to experience corruptions in my music or sample drives?

The 'lineup' of drives I'm planning will be:

* 640GB Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit drive formatted as NTFS (will probably be upgraded to Windows 8 when released)
* 640GB OSX Mountain Lion drive formatted as HFS+
* 500GB Media and Data Drive formatted as FAT32 to be used by both OS as a general stuff sharing drive
* 120GB Photo Library Drive formatted as FAT32
* 1TB eSATA Sample Library Drive formatted as FAT32
* 500GB USB Music Drive formatted as FAT32
* 120GB USB Photo Library Backup Drive formatted as FAT32

Would all except the two OS drives, all formatted to FAT32, be fine to share between Windows 7 and OSX environments without risk of corruption/messing up data etc?

 

[scorcho]

I would personally stick with NTFS because it is more robust than FAT32. To allow OSX to make use of that format, install Tuxera NTFS for Mac. They have a long history developing the open-source NTFS-3G.

Another alternative is using EXFAT, which both systems support. The only issue with that format is that, from what I remember, there is little error correction built into the file system, making it quite easy to corrupt and lose data.

http://www.tuxera.com/

 

[Bunford]

How reliable is this? I seem to remember there being some issues with it before and it was far from foolproof to use third party NTFS software on a Mac.

 

[Dschijn]

Better use exFAT. Can be used by Windows and OSX and exFAT is able to use Files bigger than 4gb (fat32 can't)!