Use HFS+ or NTFS for Bootcamp-shared harddrive?

Question

I put a second HDD into my MacBook Pro. Now I want to install Windows with Bootcamp and want both OSX and Windows to be able to read and write to that HDD.

What I am asking is whether you'd recommend using HFS+ for this data partition and MacDrive to access it on Windows or format it as NTFS and use Tuxera NTFS for Mac to write to the NTFS disc.

Answer 1

Well, first of all, you also have the choice to use FAT 32 too. Yeah, it's not that great, but you have first-class read and write support from both OSes.

Then, maybe give exFAT a spin. It's natively supported in both OS X and Windows. Linux might be more tricky though.

And finally, if you want to spend money, the choice is really yours. I'd try and check reviews for both products. Since you're going to have to buy them anyway, you can also rely on customer support here. In practice, it really won't matter. Both Tuxera NTFS and MacDrive work as expected.

One thing to mention though is that in the case of data loss, there's a larger market for NTFS undelete tools. And Linux read/write support for NTFS is more omnipresent than for HFS+ — Linux still can't write to HFS+ formatted volumes with journaling enabled.