If you need to be sure without the time to test it, it is best to do the formatting on Windows since there don’t appear to be any compatibility problems that way. From what I understand, Windows doesn’t always like the way Mac’s do the formatting on some larger drives, though, so give it a try and if your Windows machines don’t like it, just format the drive with Windows. This file system can be read and written by both Mac and Windows with support for single files of up to 128 petabytes! Even better, it’s freely included in both operating systems.Ī drive can be formatted with exFAT using either a Windows or a Mac computer. The other is to format your drives with the exFAT file system. One is to use a paid 3rd party tool to add NTFS write support to a Mac, such as Paragon’s NTFS for Mac tool. Then there is the inability to write files greater than 4gb on Fat32 and of course the complete lack of support on Windows for a Mac drive formatted with HFS+. First, there is the lack of NTFS write capability on Mac’s.
When you work (or live) in an environment that consists of both Mac and Windows computers, it becomes a constant headache negotiating the different filesystems and their compatibility.
