I wanted to be able to use this external drive on my Mac to store files such as larger Virtual Machine's, software, etc while at the same time keeping the ability to be able to read this drive from a Windows machine without installing any software on the Windows machine.Ĭross-platform incompatibility has been a huge roadblock for people who have to move back and forth between Windows and macOS, especially when you need to share files between Windows and Mac using an NTFS drive. I bought a new external 500GB USB drive for my laptop, which happens to be a Mac that I also run Windows 7 in a Virtual Machine. I've used at least 10 other hard drives (conventional HDs not SSDs) formatted in ExFAT and they've always worked across Windows and Mac with full read-write functionality. I formatted it again in ExFAT on Mac, then when connected to Windows it comes up as read only - the drive can be read but no data can be added or changed, it can only be written to on Mac. However, with OS X update 10.6.5, Apple fully supports accessing exFAT drives. However, previously Apple OS X users have had difficulty accessing exFAT drives. As previously discussed in our exFAT versus FAT32 versus NTFS article, exFAT is a good modern update to Microsoft's file system. I can confirm that after I re-formated my external 2 TB HDD from exFAT with 2048K allocation unit size to exFAT with 1024K allocation unit size, the disk is now discoverable by Mac OS and I can work with it just fine.

By Juno | Posted to NTFS for Mac Tips, updated on November 18th, 2020

Mac read exfat usb