Drive to Share between Boot Camp and OS X - What Format?

[XianPalin]

I have a Mac Pro and plan to have this setup with 3 drives:

Drive 1 - 500GB - OS X, HFS
Drive 2 - 500GB - Windows (trying Vista for now), NTFS
Drive 3 - 320GB - ??

Drive 3 will have my media files to share between apps on both operating systems - Pictures, Mp3s, Movies, etc.

What format should drive 3 be in? I would prefer to have the drive writable by both operating systems.

From what I can tell I have two options:

• HFS+ - Use MacDrive under Windows to gain access to the drive and read/write to it.
• FAT32 - Native support under each OS, need to use a 3rd party tool to format it to 320GB.

(There is the third option of having NTFS and using ntfs-3g, but from what I can tell it's not something I should rely on and can occasionally cause corruption.)

I guess the real question is, how reliable is MacDrive 7? Is it reliable enough to do a decent amount of writing to the drive and not cause corruption? Or should I just be safe instead of sorry and go for FAT32, and use each OS's respective drive for files > 4GB?

 

[TEG]

FAT32, for all of its problems, would be the easiest to use.

TEG

 

[jeremy.king]

need to use a 3rd party tool to format it to 320GB.

You can do this from your Mac. Use Disk Utility or command line.

 

[Mr. Zarniwoop]

There is the third option of having NTFS and using ntfs-3g, but from what I can tell it's not something I should rely on and can occasionally cause corruption.

I've used NTFS-3g and Paragon NTFS for Mac and found both highly reliable for internal drives. I think NTFS in general is a nightmare with external drives sharing them across OSes when people yank them prior to shutting down without "Safely Remove Hardware" in Windows or unmounting the drive in OS X. If you always shutdown, or always eject the external drive, I believe you'll find NTFS the best choice.

 

[XianPalin]

You can do this from your Mac. Use Disk Utility or command line.

I assumed I would run into this situation if I did it under OS X :
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/430367/

 

[jeremy.king]

I assumed I would run into this situation if I did it under OS X :

I've done it several times without error. I don't know what happened to that person, but I assure you that you can format a FAT32 volume from OS X.