Fat Truecrypt Volume on External Drive formatted Mac OS

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MBP 15" 2.6GHz i7 16GB 1T; Mini (late 2012) 2.3GHz i7 16GB 1TB; iPhone 5; iPad 3; AppleTV2
I'm still relatively new to Mac and and very new to Truecrypt - and not understanding why when I create a new Truecrypt container file on my external USB drive (formatted Mac OS Extended) I'm given the option of formatting TC as FAT. Does this mean that in the overall Mac OS Extended drive there will be this small piece of space (TC) that will be formatted FAT?

If I do this v. formatting TC for Mac OS will I be able to connect the external drive to a windows computer and mount the TC volume for read/write?

Is there any disadvantage to formatting TC as FAT from a Mac performance/compatibility perspective?

Either way, I will be keeping the TC containers relatively small (probably under 250MB, if this is relevant to the question about performance.

thanks
 
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FAT will give you read/write from both OSes = True

External USB drive formatted HFS+ will not be readable for Windows so it doesn't matter what the TC image file is, the drive itself won't be readable by Windows.

Disadvantages for FAT are 4GB file size limits, but since you are creating several 250MB images, (which I personally don't understand) you won't need worry of that limit.

You could partition the the drive with a FAT and HFS+ partition and just encrypt both partitions and be done. You'd have to use the Mac to move stuff to the FAT for Windows, or just deal with the FAT 4GB limit and do the who drive FAT and encrypt it.
 
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External USB drive formatted HFS+ will not be readable for Windows so it doesn't matter what the TC image file is, the drive itself won't be readable by Windows.

OK, that's exactly what I thought. But when I saw the option in TC for a drive that was already formatted HFS+ I was curious as to whether or not TC worked some magic and was able to make that piece of the drive readable by Windows - but not really expecting this to be the case.

Disadvantages for FAT are 4GB file size limits, but since you are creating several 250MB images, (which I personally don't understand) you won't need worry of that limit.

The reason for the small images... I back up my data to Crashplan+. As a test, I created a 2GB TC container file, mounted it in TC and moved a small scanned document (similar in size to the files that I'll be storing in the TC folder). Crashplan saw this as a change to the whole 2GB file and backed up the entire file. This took 55 minutes which, I'm guessing, is due to the encryption. Normally 2GB files get backed up very quickly

Since I'm only planning on storing scanned financial documents in TC, which might mean 3 or 4 files, each less than a1MB, moved into the TC file every month or two, I'd rather not trigger a 55 minute backup each time.
 

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