# exFat File System Work on Mac?



## Landino

Hi there,
I've been a proud Mac owner for over 3 years now, but being an IT student I have to constantly dual boot into Windows. Since Mac cannot Modify NTFS partitions, I have been using FAT32 File systems on all of my external drives.

Unfortunately only being able to transfer 4.xx GB files onto FAT32 gets quite annoying. I do also have a small NTFS Partition on my hard drives just in case.

I was thinking of switching over to the new exFAT File system on all of my external drives to hopefully get around the file size transfer limit. 

Does anybody know if exFAT is compatible for Mac? and/or if there are any Mac Drivers?

Any information would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
Landino


----------



## gordguide

You sound like someone who would be really happy to hear what everyone else who needs read/write support on NTFS uses on OSX.

Amit Singh, who is an outstanding programmer, developer, and writer, perhaps most famous for installing more than 60 different Operating Systems on his 2003 model 17" PowerBook took a job with Google a while ago.

Google, in case you didn't know, encourages employees to work on experimental projects, and gives a certain amount of paid company time in order to explore virtually any idea the staffer wants.

Amit decided to use his company project time write MacFUSE, which you should go to right after reading this, and seriously consider installing. I recommend the stable version over the beta.

MacFUSE is an environment that allows virtually any file system to mount on OSX. Although I do believe there is support for exFAT, maybe you would rather just have read/write support on NTFS instead?

Once you install MacFUSE, head over to the NTFS-3g for MacOSX project, which ports the NTFS-3g file system used on UNIX and Linux to read and write to Microsoft NTFS file systems to MacFUSE.

Voila! Read and Write support for NTFS on OSX.

Some caveats:

Many others use MacFUSE to support various filesystems on Mac OSX. VMWare's Fusion Windows environment will install MacFUSE as part of the Fusion installer, for example. Similarly, if you need Cross-Platform encryption support (say, for a thumb drive used in both OSX and XP), you may find yourself one day checking out TrueCrypt. It too uses MacFUSE for it's OSX support.

The thing to keep in mind is the installers for both of the above, and an unknown number of other OSX apps, may overwrite your own MacFUSE installation, and without actually warning you during the install. Often an older version of MacFUSE will be installed in it's place. Be aware that it's a possibility, basically.

The current NTFS-3g drive requires that you unmount any NTFS volumes before they are removed, for example if you use an external USB drive. Failure to do so can cause corruption (and it's true on Windows as well; always unmount NTFS volumes properly on XP, Vista, or OSX). If you experience a dirty unmount of an NTFS volume, whether by accident or your own error, run fsck via Windows on that volume as soon as possible to avoid problems in the future.

Secondly, the System Preference/Control Panel for Startup Disk doesn't support selecting an NTFS-3g volume; you have to boot with the Option key down to select the Windows partition if you run XP or Vista via BootCamp.


----------

