exFAT – The key to working across PC & Mac

I recently purchased a 1TB portable usb hard drive to store a complete copy of my iTunes Library (yes it is that large) 😉 and noticed that the drive was formatted with NTFS.

So that’s great if you are a Windows user only, but that’s a problem on Apple Mac’s which even with the most upto date release of OS X, can only read NTFS formatted disks.

Usually I would re-format the portable drive using the FAT32 format, however this has its own limitations (4Gb file size and 32Gb max partitions).

The answer is Microsoft’s exFAT format. Not only does it remove the size limits, it plays really well with PC & Mac — works a treat for me and I recommend you take a look if you have >32Gb portable drives.

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