What is currently the best file system to use for drives that are regularly accessed (both reading and writing) from both Windows and OS X on a single machine using BootCamp. The most important points are stability and speed.
I've been using NTFS so far, coming from a Windows background. I've tried the NTFS-3G driver with Fuse and, in my tests, it was far slower than native NTFS under Windows. I also tried their commercial driver without much better results.
Afterward I tried Paragon's drivers, which were much faster. They aren't quite native NTFS speed, but they aren't far off either. The problem is I've had crashes with them, and recently had crashes + data loss with them.
I know this question has been asked before, but the posts I saw were older and the driver and filesystem options are maturing.
Options I've seen:
- FAT32: Limited drive size? Limited permission settings
- NTFS: Limited speed/stability under OS X
- HFS+: MacDrive? available for Windows
Follow Up
I have now formatted one of the drives as exFAT and can confirm that this works great for both reading and writing when the machine is booted into either OS X or Windows 7.
Best Answer
If you're working exclusively with Win7 machines
(i.e. no Vista or XP), and 10.6.6 or greater on the Mac side, try exFAT. Native read/write support under Win7 and OS X, and none of the file size limits of FAT32. Disk Utility will happily format your drives using it.As long as you don't need legacy support, it's probably your best option, as it avoids any user-space filesystem drivers, which personally make me a bit uneasy.Addendum: XP and Vista do support exFAT, Vista as of SP1, and XP with SP2 and the KB955704 update