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I have an external drive that I want to keep in my windows server as a shared volume to use to access with my main computer which is a mac laptop.

Occasionally there are some large files that can't be transferred over the network due to their size and I would like to take out the external and temporally plug it into my mac to copy these files.

Since mac cant write to NTFS formatted drives and windows won't even detect HFS+ formatted drives, is there any other workaround that will let me share the entire volume over the network through windows server but enables me to from time to time plug it directly into my mac laptop? Thanks!

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marked as duplicate by Karan, gronostaj, techie007, Jens Erat, Raystafarian Jul 14 '13 at 10:57


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up vote 0 down vote accepted

Wikipedia has a nice table of common File Systems and the Operating Systems that support them. Pick one that both Windows and Mac support. Note: exFAT

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FAT32 has been an option but as I mentioned I am dealing with large files, most of which clock over the 4GB limit of the FAT32 file system. –  SteppingHat Jul 12 '13 at 13:39
I'm looking into the UDF (universal disk format) which I have never heard of. I've scoured the internet for a while and can't seem to figure out how stable it is nor how to format a drive as UDF. Any tips? –  SteppingHat Jul 12 '13 at 13:46
"large" is pretty meaningless - I've heard people refer to 100MB files as large. Excuse the brainfart, I meant to recommend exFAT, which is really just FAT32 with some minor tweaks, including support for exabyte files. –  Chris S Jul 12 '13 at 13:57
haha okay. Well large to me is around 100GB. And exFAT seems like the way to go! Thanks heaps for the link it's actually really helped :) –  SteppingHat Jul 12 '13 at 14:04
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