

Sounds like you've used the ExFAT drive though for archiving mostly. I have personal experience with it crashing my Mac and rendering it non-bootable. There is a particularly egregious stability and data integrity bug which was reported to Apple over a year ago and to my knowledge is still not fixed: /blog/2014/ Other filesystem options include Paragon NTFS on the Mac: and HFS+ for Windows: HFS+ is a good file system but it is not without bugs. Many of them are too slow to edit from, although a few are considerably faster such as the HGST Touro S: There are also possible issues with spontaneous USB disconnects, which rarely happen on Thunderbolt drives. In general I'd suggest using portable bus-powered USB 3 hard drives for data transfer and archiving, not editing off of them (whether formatted HFS+ or exFAT). If there's a possibility the removable drive will be shared between Mac and Windows, use exFAT. On an HDD you know will be Mac only, use HFS+. However in general they perform about the same. There might be a few rare "edge cases" where on a certain HDD or USB thumb drive HFS+ might be faster on some benchmarks than exFAT. In general I haven't found any major issues with using exFAT on Macs. I've never had any problems reading or writing to those drives from a Mac due to the filesystem itself.Īs the librarian for my video production group, I have done extensive performance and reliability testing on many different hard drives and disk formats. I have over 100 terabytes of archival video material, much of which is on exFAT formatted drives. I just assumed working off an ExFAT drive would be bad, but i just wanted confirmation. After the files transfer to that 'in between' drive, we then have to connect it to their editing computer and transfer it to their external editing hard drive.

and we use ExFAT because the files are always to large for just regular FAT). Since we can't connect their external drive to the windows computer since it won't recognize, we have to get an 'in between' drive, that is formatted as NTFS or ExFAT (we have several, some are just different. The issue comes with when they need to transfer files off the switcher and onto their editing computer. So we have external drives that are connected to those iMacs formatted as Mac Extended. We also have the citizens that use the facility edit on Premiere on iMac's. However, Tricaster only runs on a windows OS, so all the files are saved on an NTFS drive inside the system. We have people shoot their shows inside our studio using the Newtek Tricaster system. I work at an access center, and i'm trying to think of alternatives to make production a little faster.
