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> NTFS is the de facto filesystem for portable data storage I thought it was FAT32. Do Macs support NTFS? EDIT: It seems they don't out of the box: <https://w

> NTFS is the de facto filesystem for portable data storage I thought it was FAT32. Do Macs support NTFS? EDIT: It seems they don't out of the box: <https://www.howtogeek.com/236055/HOW-TO-WRITE-TO-NTFS-DRIVES-ON-A-MAC/ https://www.howtogeek.com/236055/HOW-TO-WRITE-TO-NTFS-DRIVES...> EDIT 2: Since many comments replied with the same thing, I'll reply here: I wouldn't consider read-only support as support for portable data storage, since that allows you only to send data in one direction. When you want to copy a file from a Mac to a Windows computer, NTFS is not a solution now (out of the box at least), therefore falls pretty short wrt "portable".

CapsAdmin 5y ago
Yeah, you need to use FAT32 if you want to make a cross os portable drive.
simias 5y ago
FAT32 doesn't support files bigger than 4GiB, that's a huge limitation these days. But I don't disagree that calling NTFS "portable" is a bit of a stretch, although hopefully that'll change if good quality open source drivers become available.
- beermonster 5y ago
  NTFS has journaling,compression, encryption, max 255 character filenames, max partition size is hundred of TB rather than 2GB, generally faster performance wise. Trouble is , FAT32 has more OS compatibility. Would be nice if Linux did have first class support for NTFS as it’s superior. But right now for maximum compatibility you need FAT32
  - sascha_sl 5y ago
    > max 255 character filenames it doesn't in spec, that's just the win32 API
    - jasode 5y ago
      >it doesn't in spec, that's just the win32 API NTFS filename length is limited to 255 Unicode chars. You may be thinking of full path lengths of 32,767 Unicode chars but the filename component is still limited to 255. If you look at the NTFS data structure "$FILE_NAME (0x30)" at byte offset 0x40: https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+%22%24FILE_NAME%22+byte https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+%22%24FILE_NAME%22+byte ... there's only 1 byte used to describe the filename length. Hence max of 255 chars. Wikipedia page about NTFS also mentions 255 max length for filename: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
    - ziml77 5y ago
      You're confusing the filename length limit with the limitation on the entire path length in the Windows API. NTFS allows paths to be up to 32k characters long, but each path component tops out at 255 characters.
  - wyuenho 5y ago
    The Paragon driver cannot recognize encrypted NTFS volumes AFAIK
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    > max partition size is hundred of TB rather than 2GB FAT16 is limited to 2GB, FAT32 can extend to 2TB (but the max file size for a single file is 4GB, as the parent stated)
- ulzeraj 5y ago
  A bit of personal experience: I've needed to create a Windows 10 installer from a MacOS computer a few weeks ago. Without the MS helper program I've figured I should perform the following steps: 1- download iso 2- format usb with fat32 3- copy the data Apparently you can't just dd the ISO file into the USB block device like every other Linux or BSD ISO. It need to be FAT32 to be able to boot through UEFI. The issue however is that the .wim file containing the OS installation source is bigger than 4GB. I think its sources.wim but I'm not sure. I had to install some command line utility from brew that did the job of "optimizing" the WIM file and managed to reduce it to a file bellow 4GB. What does optimizing means? Better compression? Cleaning up crap inside the image? If their ISO tool probably does this without user interaction then why include a file bigger than what the FS can handle in the first place? I don't know if this counts as some kind of dark pattern or MS being really antiquated in terms of bootable flash drivers.
  - cto_of_antifa 5y ago
    This is what the use BalenaEtcher for.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    It's a case of it working fine on Windows, so, there's no need to bother supporting anything else.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    What I'm doing is just using GPT partitioning, creating one NTFS partition and copy all files there. All my computers were able to boot in UEFI mode from this USB drive and successfully install Windows. With Linux it was a bit more cumbersome, but most Linux distros are hybrid ISOs anyway, so it's not as big issue. I know that UEFI BIOS is not obligated to support NTFS partitions, but my little practice they do.
    - ulzeraj 5y ago
      Good to know that this is an option but from MacOS I don't have NTFS write capabilities. I think ExFat is available so I might try two partitions one being the EFI ESP and the second containing the rest of the install files.
nullify88 5y ago
exFAT is probably better in terms of cross platform compatibility and addresses a lot of the limitations of FAT while remaining portable. Since Snow Leopard OS X is able to read and write out the box. Linux natively supported from kernel 5.4. Windows supports it from updated XP and onwards. I not sure of Android compatibility though.
- cassianoleal 5y ago
  > addresses a lot of the limitations of FAT while remaining portable Whilst at the same time missing a very important feature for portable storage - a journal.
  - tssva 5y ago
    Journaling can have significant downsides when used with external flash storage including reduced performance and increased wear of the flash memory.
    - cassianoleal 5y ago
      Not disputing your facts, but I've used journalled file systems in flash drives since forever and never had a performance issue that was not directly tied to the hardware, and most have lasted many years. I prefer having to replace a cheap flash drive more frequently than to lose data altogether. Of course, everybody's use case is different and tradeoffs need to be considered.
- polar 5y ago
  Is exFAT's reputation for data loss/corruption unwarranted?
  - cerved 5y ago
    no, not journaled
  - blarg1 5y ago
    I had an external harddrive with exfat that lost all its partition information. Worked one day, then few days later plugged it in and it was all gone.
3np 5y ago
IN my mind it has been exFAT for the past several years.
knuthsat 5y ago
I have no idea if I did something, but after MacOS 11 upgrade it seems to automatically mount my NTFS drive. I do know that FUSE MacOS stuff seems to be disabled in brew.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  I think that brew is unable to install the kexts of k Catalina+. I had to use the pkg
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  This has been true for a long time. Does it mount it r/w or read only?
  - knuthsat 5y ago
    Interesting. Previously I had to run the mounting command manually ever since I remember trying to mount an NTFS drive. It's read only.
rolleiflex 5y ago
They do, but only to read, not write. I think the current up to date recommendation for cross-OS compatibility on external drives is to use ExFAT, though I believe the concept of the ‘external drive’ itself should be deprecated.
- fabiomaia 5y ago
  > though I believe the concept of the ‘external drive’ itself should be deprecated why?
  - rolleiflex 5y ago
    I think they’re problematic because they’ve reached ungodly amounts of storage and I don’t think most non-technical people fully understand how much of a loaded gun a non-regularly-backed-up 2TB external HDD is. As a real world example, I’ve had to help recover my aunt’s 5-year-old 2TB HDD that she dropped several times and had no backup of, and by helping I mean confirming she probably lost a terabyte plus of data unless she wants to pay five digits USD to pay to a recovery company for a way less than 100% recovery. She is a highly educated professional (a MD) and yet, it did not even occur to her that the drive will not only might fail, but rather, will fail. To quite a lot of non-technical people an external drive appears to be the safest form of storage, considering its being physically visible and movable. The closest analogy is storing money under the pillow versus a in bank, in all the good and bad ways.
piskov 5y ago
Macs support NTFS in read-only mode out of the box. For writing you need tools like Paragon NTFS.
shoo_pl 5y ago
It's actually exFAT thats portable. NTFS is mostly for windows users, and macs do support it - though only reading.
- harry8 5y ago
  Anyone know why? Given ext2 has had a public domain implementation for more than a decade? Is it because windows & mac won't support ext2 even for free? Seems like a better lowest common denominator fs than any of the fats?
  - shikoba 5y ago
    You can't use easily ext2 on an external storage because of permissions.
    - harry8 5y ago
      Isn't that how it's mounted that matters there?
      - shikoba 5y ago
        I never find an option to ignore permissions.
    - MisterTea 5y ago
      That's because Linux and OSX ignore NTFS permissions making it work more like FAT. Plug an existing NTFS drive from one Windows system into another Windows system and you get a similar issue where opening a home directory requires you to take ownership.
      - shikoba 5y ago
        But Linux refuse to ignore permissions on an ext2.
- cerved 5y ago
Macha 5y ago
Buy an external hard drive or USB stick, unless it's marketed as "for Mac", it's going to ship formatted as NTFS.
- cerved 5y ago
  memory cards are FAT32
- yakubin 5y ago
  IME most external hard drives and USB sticks are marketed as compatible with both Windows and Mac, and ship formatted with FAT32. But maybe I'm the odd one here.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    Most these days ship as exFAT.
- evgen 5y ago
  Literally NONE of the 100s of Tb I have purchased over the past year in formats ranging from SD card to USB stick to SATA drives have been formatted as NTFS. None of them.

CapsAdmin 5y ago

Yeah, you need to use FAT32 if you want to make a cross os portable drive.

simias 5y ago

FAT32 doesn't support files bigger than 4GiB, that's a huge limitation these days. But I don't disagree that calling NTFS "portable" is a bit of a stretch, although hopefully that'll change if good quality open source drivers become available.

beermonster 5y ago
NTFS has journaling,compression, encryption, max 255 character filenames, max partition size is hundred of TB rather than 2GB, generally faster performance wise. Trouble is , FAT32 has more OS compatibility. Would be nice if Linux did have first class support for NTFS as it’s superior. But right now for maximum compatibility you need FAT32
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  > max 255 character filenames it doesn't in spec, that's just the win32 API
  - jasode 5y ago
    >it doesn't in spec, that's just the win32 API NTFS filename length is limited to 255 Unicode chars. You may be thinking of full path lengths of 32,767 Unicode chars but the filename component is still limited to 255. If you look at the NTFS data structure "$FILE_NAME (0x30)" at byte offset 0x40: https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+%22%24FILE_NAME%22+byte https://www.google.com/search?q=ntfs+%22%24FILE_NAME%22+byte ... there's only 1 byte used to describe the filename length. Hence max of 255 chars. Wikipedia page about NTFS also mentions 255 max length for filename: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
  - ziml77 5y ago
    You're confusing the filename length limit with the limitation on the entire path length in the Windows API. NTFS allows paths to be up to 32k characters long, but each path component tops out at 255 characters.
- wyuenho 5y ago
  The Paragon driver cannot recognize encrypted NTFS volumes AFAIK
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > max partition size is hundred of TB rather than 2GB FAT16 is limited to 2GB, FAT32 can extend to 2TB (but the max file size for a single file is 4GB, as the parent stated)
ulzeraj 5y ago
A bit of personal experience: I've needed to create a Windows 10 installer from a MacOS computer a few weeks ago. Without the MS helper program I've figured I should perform the following steps: 1- download iso 2- format usb with fat32 3- copy the data Apparently you can't just dd the ISO file into the USB block device like every other Linux or BSD ISO. It need to be FAT32 to be able to boot through UEFI. The issue however is that the .wim file containing the OS installation source is bigger than 4GB. I think its sources.wim but I'm not sure. I had to install some command line utility from brew that did the job of "optimizing" the WIM file and managed to reduce it to a file bellow 4GB. What does optimizing means? Better compression? Cleaning up crap inside the image? If their ISO tool probably does this without user interaction then why include a file bigger than what the FS can handle in the first place? I don't know if this counts as some kind of dark pattern or MS being really antiquated in terms of bootable flash drivers.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  This is what the use BalenaEtcher for.
- freeone3000 5y ago
  It's a case of it working fine on Windows, so, there's no need to bother supporting anything else.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  What I'm doing is just using GPT partitioning, creating one NTFS partition and copy all files there. All my computers were able to boot in UEFI mode from this USB drive and successfully install Windows. With Linux it was a bit more cumbersome, but most Linux distros are hybrid ISOs anyway, so it's not as big issue. I know that UEFI BIOS is not obligated to support NTFS partitions, but my little practice they do.
  - ulzeraj 5y ago
    Good to know that this is an option but from MacOS I don't have NTFS write capabilities. I think ExFat is available so I might try two partitions one being the EFI ESP and the second containing the rest of the install files.

nullify88 5y ago

exFAT is probably better in terms of cross platform compatibility and addresses a lot of the limitations of FAT while remaining portable. Since Snow Leopard OS X is able to read and write out the box. Linux natively supported from kernel 5.4. Windows supports it from updated XP and onwards. I not sure of Android compatibility though.

cassianoleal 5y ago
> addresses a lot of the limitations of FAT while remaining portable Whilst at the same time missing a very important feature for portable storage - a journal.
- tssva 5y ago
  Journaling can have significant downsides when used with external flash storage including reduced performance and increased wear of the flash memory.
  - cassianoleal 5y ago
    Not disputing your facts, but I've used journalled file systems in flash drives since forever and never had a performance issue that was not directly tied to the hardware, and most have lasted many years. I prefer having to replace a cheap flash drive more frequently than to lose data altogether. Of course, everybody's use case is different and tradeoffs need to be considered.
polar 5y ago
Is exFAT's reputation for data loss/corruption unwarranted?
- cerved 5y ago
  no, not journaled
- blarg1 5y ago
  I had an external harddrive with exfat that lost all its partition information. Worked one day, then few days later plugged it in and it was all gone.

3np 5y ago

IN my mind it has been exFAT for the past several years.

knuthsat 5y ago

I have no idea if I did something, but after MacOS 11 upgrade it seems to automatically mount my NTFS drive. I do know that FUSE MacOS stuff seems to be disabled in brew.

cto_of_antifa 5y ago
I think that brew is unable to install the kexts of k Catalina+. I had to use the pkg
gattilorenz 5y ago
This has been true for a long time. Does it mount it r/w or read only?
- knuthsat 5y ago
  Interesting. Previously I had to run the mounting command manually ever since I remember trying to mount an NTFS drive. It's read only.

rolleiflex 5y ago

They do, but only to read, not write. I think the current up to date recommendation for cross-OS compatibility on external drives is to use ExFAT, though I believe the concept of the ‘external drive’ itself should be deprecated.

fabiomaia 5y ago
> though I believe the concept of the ‘external drive’ itself should be deprecated why?
- rolleiflex 5y ago
  I think they’re problematic because they’ve reached ungodly amounts of storage and I don’t think most non-technical people fully understand how much of a loaded gun a non-regularly-backed-up 2TB external HDD is. As a real world example, I’ve had to help recover my aunt’s 5-year-old 2TB HDD that she dropped several times and had no backup of, and by helping I mean confirming she probably lost a terabyte plus of data unless she wants to pay five digits USD to pay to a recovery company for a way less than 100% recovery. She is a highly educated professional (a MD) and yet, it did not even occur to her that the drive will not only might fail, but rather, will fail. To quite a lot of non-technical people an external drive appears to be the safest form of storage, considering its being physically visible and movable. The closest analogy is storing money under the pillow versus a in bank, in all the good and bad ways.

piskov 5y ago

Macs support NTFS in read-only mode out of the box. For writing you need tools like Paragon NTFS.

shoo_pl 5y ago

It's actually exFAT thats portable. NTFS is mostly for windows users, and macs do support it - though only reading.

harry8 5y ago
Anyone know why? Given ext2 has had a public domain implementation for more than a decade? Is it because windows & mac won't support ext2 even for free? Seems like a better lowest common denominator fs than any of the fats?
- shikoba 5y ago
  You can't use easily ext2 on an external storage because of permissions.
  - harry8 5y ago
    Isn't that how it's mounted that matters there?
    - shikoba 5y ago
      I never find an option to ignore permissions.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    That's because Linux and OSX ignore NTFS permissions making it work more like FAT. Plug an existing NTFS drive from one Windows system into another Windows system and you get a similar issue where opening a home directory requires you to take ownership.
    - shikoba 5y ago
      But Linux refuse to ignore permissions on an ext2.
cerved 5y ago

Macha 5y ago

Buy an external hard drive or USB stick, unless it's marketed as "for Mac", it's going to ship formatted as NTFS.

cerved 5y ago
memory cards are FAT32
yakubin 5y ago
IME most external hard drives and USB sticks are marketed as compatible with both Windows and Mac, and ship formatted with FAT32. But maybe I'm the odd one here.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Most these days ship as exFAT.
evgen 5y ago
Literally NONE of the 100s of Tb I have purchased over the past year in formats ranging from SD card to USB stick to SATA drives have been formatted as NTFS. None of them.