I'm about to set up a new external NVMe SSD drive as my DJ music store. I use Windows laptops, but have been toying with the idea of buying a Mac potentially, just for sole DJ use.

Therefore, the drive will be used by both Windows and Mac potentially. I'm also considering things like hard junctioning the iTunes library to the hard drive too, so both can hopefully use the same iTunes library .xml file.

What is the best format for this? Is it true that Mac still can't fully used, and in particularly write to NTFS? Is FAT32 better? Or exFAT?

Welcome any views so I can crack on and prep the drive

 

if you need r/w from both OS then exFat with native support.

You will loose journaling, encryption, on the fly compression and enhanced perms/sec.

There are 3rd party paid solutions for r/w of XFS or NTFS for mac from Paragon, even if you have encryption on, but it gets dicey and exFat is free. If you just storing well organized sets and don't need OS level fast search or metadata support no reason not choose it.

 

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. I was contemplating exFAT as the drive will literally just have a list of genre folder, within which there will be decade/year folders, within which are the tracks in .mp3 files primarily.

Is there any potentially read or speed issues with exFAT when loading drive/tracks into DJ software at all?

 

If you don't need support for single files over 4 GiB or partitions over 2 TiB, it's most likely FAT32. It works on every system without additional tools etc. Otherwise it's exFAT. exFAT led to problems with case sensitivity in the past resulting in a corrupt fs, though. NTFS is proprietary and still problematic to write on macOS, but the only fs with TRIM support on Windows.

 

It's a 2TB NVMe SSD and will be a single partition, and none of the tracks are over 4GB. However, when formatting, I don't get the option to format as FAT32 so have gone for exFAT. How likely are the issues you mention above @Olaf ?

 

For what it's worth, external drives are always vulnerable to data loss (I've had drives lose sync mid-use and completely corrupt the drive - this isn't merely about failing to dismount before unplugging) and I've had far less issues with exFAT file allocation table corruption than NTFS MFT corruption.

Make sure you always have a backup.

 

exFAT.

 

shoo be do be do wop sha bebop sha bam, i am the rumpelstiltskin man

 

Last edited: Apr 4, 2023

exFAT formatted in Windows,
there is no other usable interoperable filesystem you could use, and it's far from ideal,

NTFS can be read from MacOS but not written, and all those third-party drivers and apps that allow writing on NTFS aren't 100% reliable,

years back it kept pissing me off so much I finally got a NAS which can be accessed from both Windows and MacOS (smb, afp), without ever dealing with filesystem compatibility ever again

 

If the different computers are connected to the same network, you could also opt for setting up a network drive, leave the drive connected to one of the two computers (I guess the Apple one where you use it for Djing) and set up a network shareable Folder based on the external drive, then access it from the Windows based computer when needed and of course you can share it from the Windows computer as well.

 

You need to use exFAT, if you use NFTS and have permissions from difference account users on your windows machine this could cause some issues when MadOS writes new files there.

Stick with exFAT.

 

Windows itself doesn't want you to format partitions > 32 GiB to FAT in favor of Microsoft's own NTFS. You would need 3rd party tools to do it.

Try to avoid having files like "FOO.BAR" and "foo.bar" in the same directory and it should be fine.

 

I have extensive experience with this...good and very bad experience.

After trying many solutions, these are the two methods I use that work consistently:

Method 1: Format the drive as NTFS. Use Paragon NTFS for Mac for read/write access. DO NOT try it the other way around. Paragon HFS/APFS could have issues that corrupt your Mac partition. NTFS is the way to go with this method.

Method 2: Get a NAS. I use a QNAP NAS like a middle-man drive over 1 gigabit network. I map the drives on each OS and it shows up like any other. Not as fast as direct connection, but suitable for most needs. I also use a custom VPN to get access on any of my devices when away.


WARNINGS ABOUT OTHER METHODS I DON'T RECOMMEND:

EXFAT seems like a nice idea, but can get corrupted, even from a simple disconnection while writing. it is not journaled/indexed like native Mac and Windows formats. So it is RISKY for your data

FAT/FA32 - JUST FORGET ABOUT IT

iCloud/OneDrive/DropBox: These are decent solutions, but sometimes they have delays syncing. They can also eat up ram and laptop battery in the background.