Bypassing the 4GB Limit

[Michael T O'Connor]

I have a question that perhaps some of you out there could answer for me...

I'm a mac and PC user, and I need to switch files in between both systems. However, as you know, 4GB isn't much space. So, what's the best (only?) filesystem that is read/write compatible with Windows/OSX ? I heard that some manufacturers are gonna move to exFAT with some of the larger flash drives due to inefficiencies in FAT, but exFAT is proprietary, and I'm not sure OSX is gonna support it anytime soon.

Any advice?

[Conrad Hunziker]

If the only places you will take your drives are your own windows boxes, you could install the Ext2 driver for windows. Then you could format your drive in mac as ext2 and read/write to it in windows. Ext2 has a 16Gb file size limit, and a 2Tb partition limit.

Im still waiting for ZFS support

[cinedigital]

Macdrive gives the native Mac OS X HFS+ read & write capability under Windows, which has a file size limit in Exabytes :cool:

I found it a good tool for cross platform file transfer on a feature I worked on a few years ago, no problems with it at all.

Haven't used it lately, so YMMV

There's a demo at http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/

I've no relationship with the company, it just worked well for me

Dave Barnard
cinedigital
London, UK

[Michael T O'Connor]

Hmm.. Very interesting. Ext2 would be nice, because that would work under Linux as well. However, I don't think I would need Linux compatibility for my files, since Linux can read/write to NTFS...

Macdrive looks great. Very interesting, and not a bad price either.

Thanks for the advice. I'll keep looking, but it looks like macdrive may be the best solution so far.