Is FAT32 reliable?

[SoundTheSurrender]

I'm getting a 500 GB external hard drive for my Macbook and I was thinking about what format to use. Is the NTFS patch safe? How is FAT32 these days? I won't plan on having a file over 4 Gigs on it. I'd rather stick to the Mac OS format but this is going to be shared with a Windows Computer as well.

 

[Nothinman]

FAT is exactly the same as it was 10 years ago, the filesystem driver in Windows has probably seen some patches but the filesystem itself is static.

 

[dawks]

Originally posted by: SoundTheSurrender
I'm getting a 500 GB external hard drive for my Macbook and I was thinking about what format to use. Is the NTFS patch safe? How is FAT32 these days? I won't plan on having a file over 4 Gigs on it. I'd rather stick to the Mac OS format but this is going to be shared with a Windows Computer as well.

FAT32 should be fine.

If you'd like to use the Mac OS filesystem, HFS, you could try MacDrive, which is a Windows program/driver that lets Windows read and write to HFS drives.