EXFAT External Hard Drive

[Spellbinder]

I'm getting either a 2012 or late 2014 Mac Mini before the end of the year. I have an external drive formatted as EXFAT. It contains music, videos and file backups. Will I be able to share between that drive and the Mac Mini? Will i be able to write to the drive?

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[ferrarr]

Usually yes, but sometimes issues have happened. Mac can natively read and write to ExFAT formatted drives.

 

[krs]

I'm getting either a 2012 or late 2014 Mac Mini before the end of the year. I have an external drive formatted as EXFAT. It contains music, videos and file backups. Will I be able to share between that drive and the Mac Mini? Will i be able to write to the drive?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Music and videos should be fine unless the file is in some proprietary format the Mac can't read
For file backups it's the same deal - reading an EXFAT formatted drive is no issue, but opening some proprietary file format could be.

 

[Spellbinder]

Thanks, guys.

Videos are MKV and MP4 (x264 ans x265), music is .mp3 and .flac. Files and image backups are typical .doc, .docx, .txt, .png and .jpg.

 

[chscag]

Some advice @Spellbinder:

ExFat is a non journaling file format and should be avoided since recovering errors on any Fat file format is hit and miss. It's best to copy those files to a HFS+ formatted drive if you're only going to read and write to them from your Mac. If you need to also access them from a PC then you can leave them as ExFat.

 

[Spellbinder]

Appreciate the input, guys!

What I ended up doing was format my spare Western Digital MyBook external drive to HFS+ and backed up the files from my EXFAT drive to that. Then reformatted the EXFAT drive to HFS+ for use with Time Machine. The Mac Mini will arrive Monday. Looking forward to finally getting back to Mac.