ExFat or HSF+ For USB Drive?

Robbietalk · May 24, 2020

Hello!

My iPad is fairly low on storage, so I recently got a powered USB hub so I could use our external HDD with it, but after plugging it all in the drive still wouldn’t show up in Files. After spending a few minutes troubleshooting, I found out that the drive is in NTFS, and of course iPads don’t support that format.

I’m now thinking of getting a new external HDD (probably a Western Digital) specifically to use with my iPad and any other iDevices that family members need photos backing up from. ExFat doesn’t sound like a great option for backups since it’s apparently a less reliable format, and I’ve had some bad experiences with SD cards (that I assume were Fat32) corrupting like crazy.

However, I don’t have a Mac, so to format the drive to HSF+ I was thinking of using Paragon Partition Manager Community Edition (which I’ve heard can format to HSF+), and then if I ever need to read it from a Windows device I’m planning to try using HFSExplorer....

I’m not sure whether I’m overthinking this, so I thought I’d ask here whether I’m giving myself an unnecessary headache and should just go with ExFat, or would a better format actually be worth the hassle?

Thanks for reading.

Grabhanem · May 24, 2020

I don't know much about HSF+, but your experience with SD cards is probably more due to SD cards being crappy MMC flash than anything to do with the filesystem, as they're generally not the most reliable of storage in general.

Robbietalk · May 25, 2020

20 hours ago, Grabhanem said:

I don't know much about HSF+, but your experience with SD cards is probably more due to SD cards being crappy MMC flash than anything to do with the filesystem, as they're generally not the most reliable of storage in general.

Thanks for letting me know about that, that makes me feel a lot better about Fat, as those SD cards really were awful.

I’ve done some more research since reading your post, and based on the experiences I’ve read it actually doesn’t sound like there’s a huge difference in reliability between exFat and HSF+ (although most seem to agree that Window’s file system is better than both, and Linux’s is even better than that), the main downside with exFat that I came across is that it uses space inefficiently, but that isn’t such a worrying problem, so I guess I’ll just get the 250 GB SSD I’ve been looking at and slap exFat on it like a normal person.