What is the difference between ntfs and hfs

I've been reading into this article, but it's quite complicated. If anyone can really get into it, i'd appreciate it. I'm all up in your bizz today! That advice is wise HFS apparently does a damn good job itself: linky jump to the Conclusion, at the bottom, if you want to skip the hairy details. At least for most usage patterns. Most forms of removable media memory cards for digital cameras, flash drives, etc use the FAT format, as the capacity of most of these devices is significantly smaller than hard drives, and the more robust formats of the two predominant operating systems is not required.

The one simple benefit of the FAT format today is that it can be read from and written to by either of the operating systems discussed here. And you can do the same on a Mac. This format gives you the ability to very easily move a drive between the two compute platforms. The error message that gets reported if you try to copy a file larger than 4GB onto the drive is misleading — it says that there is not enough room for the file. There is some risk to that though.

There are some characters in files names that aren't allowed on NTFS. Most things should be fine though. Just expect random failures every now and then while copying files. View answer in context. Loading page content. Apple Music Speciality level out of ten: 0. Regards TD. Reply Helpful Thread reply - more options Link to this Post. User profile for user: Jazzmaniac Jazzmaniac.

Audio Speciality level out of ten: 0. File names are flexible and allow up to characters. FAT32 does not support journaling, which means that integrity issues with user data or meta data can result in lost information.

FAT32 also does not support rights management. File names can be up to characters long. A small cluster size of 4 KB compared to 32 KB on FAT32 ensures that there is less wasted capacity for small files written to the drive. The smallest files are stored directly within the MFT, which is a file itself. Because of this, it can uniquely suffer from fragmentation. It also enables journaling of metadata, meaning that a write operation is first logged, the write procedure is executed, and the successful completion is updated in the journal.