Working with HFS+ formatted drives

[Darryl Ramm]

ExFAT even on Windows... Also probably not a good idea to run on. Should be fine for transferring files between systems.... which is how I would handle this... unless the OP needed to frequently switch back and forwards

[ChuckS]

Originally Posted by BScout

ExFat on the Mac has a real danger of complete file corruption. Reading from it is fine but writing to it, it does something bad to the structure of all the data on the disk.

Lost 13 episodes of work to it.

How long ago? Any format has danger if the drive is marginal. My config is all SSDs. With SSDs, hosed is hosed regardless of file system. No coming back from any errors, but none so far.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by ChuckS

How long ago? Any format has danger if the drive is marginal. My config is all SSDs. With SSDs, hosed is hosed regardless of file system. No coming back from any errors, but none so far.

If you have any concerns about robustness exFAT is the last of these file systems you should be on, NTFS is a pretty decent intent based/hardened filesystem, HFS+ was pretty mediocre, but AFS+ is technically head of the pack. Intent based logging/hardened file system highly optimized for flash storage.

[BScout]

Originally Posted by ChuckS

How long ago? Any format has danger if the drive is marginal. My config is all SSDs. With SSDs, hosed is hosed regardless of file system. No coming back from any errors, but none so far.

The drive was not "marginal." Actually none of them were (there were multiple.) This wasn't sector or block damage. This was macOS rewriting critical blocks of the file system structure.

I spoke to Apple engineering (as I am friends with product managers there) -- they said that exFAT was not to be relied on and Apple had no interest in attempting any progress to support that file system (as they were developing both APFS and looking at ZFS.) They have not and would not invest engineering resources into it.

[ChuckS]

There was a time when there were problems with ExFAT if drives were formatted on the Mac, but I believe that has since gone away (at least here). Pretty much all SD and flash drives > 32GB are formatted this way, so Apple ignoring any issues would be a problem. Paragon also has an APFS product that I have installed on a Win box, but haven't had the opportunity to test. Yet another cross platform solution.