I did this for awhile and ran into an interesting (if fatal) edge case: I use a 1.5tb external drive formatted in exFAT to minimize cross-platform headaches, a

I did this for awhile and ran into an interesting (if fatal) edge case: I use a 1.5tb external drive formatted in exFAT to minimize cross-platform headaches, and whenever the drive is marked dirty (improper shutdown, eject, etc), OSX will run fsck_exfat on it before I can use it. fsck_exfat isn't a huge deal -- or wouldn't be, if it didn't have a nasty tendency to leak RAM... the moment you plug in, fsck_exfat's footprint climbs up and up and up... never stopping! Pretty soon it's eaten up 8gb out of my 8gb RAM and poor ol' lappy is unusable. I can say with authority what happens when you run out of physical RAM in OSX: it hard locks. Nothing works -- no keyboard, no mouse, nothing. So, if you plug in your large, dirty (you dirty drive you!) exFAT-formatted external drive, with dynamic_paging switched off, and let fsck_exfat do its thing, your laptop freezes! Leaving the drive dirty, only to be re-scan on boot-up... freezing the laptop, leaving the drive dirty, only to be re-scan on bootup... EDIT: this is with Snow Leopard...