Apple and Microsoft Need Better Support for Sharing Portable Drives.
By
Staten Island, NY Posted: 11/16/2014 1:00:00 AM
It bugs me that I need to buy third party software to access Windows drives on my Mac and vice versa.
Here's the issue in a nutshell.
If you own a Mac or share portable drives with somebody who has one, you need to buy third party software to fully access the drive. To me, that's pretty strange. It's not like there isn't a need for such a feature. Apple and Microsoft just don't want to pay a license fee to cross license their file systems. How petty.
Back in the old days, there was a happy medium. You could format your portable device using and extended version of Microsoft's older FAT, like FAT32 of exFAT. Both systems can read and write to disks in this format, but as portable drives got bigger, people like me stopped using it because it's not as robust or fault tolerant. NTFS is also faster on larger drives.
If your main system is a Mac, you would want to use HFS+ because it gives you quicker access and searching using Spotlight.
In my case, I've been using a program from Paragon that gives my Mac access to NTFS drives (at full speed), and it's bundled with a Windows version that lets me read my Mac drives in Windows. The trouble is, if I take a portable Mac HFS+ drive to a client, the drive is useless unless the client has Paragon's software too.
Can't we all just get along?
The easy solution is for Microsoft and Apple to simply cross license support for each others file systems. Then we can use whatever file system we like and not have to buy anything else.
What's bugging me right now is that every now and then, I need to buy upgraded versions to support the newest OS X version.
Joe Crescenzi, Founder
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