How to format an external hard drive as UDF on a Mac

I have an external USB hard drive that I'd like to format to UDF for cross-compatibility with Windows and Macs. I tried exFAT, but for whatever reason, because of the block size (56KB) of the format, it's eaten up a huge portion of the disk space (~400GB actual data, ~900GB used disk space).

Is there a utility on Mac OS X to format hard drives to UDF?

I can't find any built-in to my version (OS X 10.8.2), and mkudffs doesn't appear to be in my $PATH, so I'm not sure where to go from here.

Nick Klauer

Posted 2013-02-21T01:05:38.980

Reputation: 547

OS X is supposed to fully support NTFS since Snow Leopard (fully updated), and anything newer. If I were you, I would go with that, unless you use Macs with older OS versions. Sounds simpler. – Ariane – 2013-02-21T01:15:53.610

@Ariane It doesn't support writing to NTFS, only reading. – Tyilo – 2013-02-24T17:43:29.677

@Tyilo http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/02/enable-write-for-ntfs-hard-drives-on.html Looks like you need a third-party thingie.

– Ariane – 2013-02-24T21:58:26.753

@Ariane I'm aware of those products, however I wanted to point out that OS X doesn't support NTFS-writing out of the box. – Tyilo – 2013-02-24T22:04:03.110

@Tyilo Yeah, sorry. An article I'd read sort of implied that, but looks like I'd interpreted it wrong. – Ariane – 2013-02-24T22:07:45.703

Answers

Using the Terminal, you might be able to format a disk into UDF. I use the following command to format Blu-Ray-Disks:

newfs_udf -v "Untitled UDF" -r 2.60 /dev/diskX

You might want to first find out under what device name your actual disk is found.

Sascha Kaupp

Posted 2013-02-21T01:05:38.980

Reputation: 579

Not to mention that revisions > 2.01 supposedly cannot be mounted in read-write on Linux.

– Tobia – 2014-10-18T20:27:27.277

I put it on Github.

– aross – 2013-11-22T14:36:23.650

3Revision 2.60 of UDF wastes space with an additional partition for metadata. This feature is useful to increase performance for DVD/BD media, but it is useless on hard disk and flash as it will reduce write performance. I recommend to use instead revision 2.01. – dolmen – 2014-06-02T21:18:19.900

Someone did some research into how to format a flash drive with udf so it can be used on as many operating systems as possible. His findings are at http://sipa.ulyssis.org/2010/02/filesystems-for-portable-disks/ and there's a script to format the disk properly at http://sipa.ulyssis.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/udfhd.pl_.txt

Dan Benamy

Posted 2013-02-21T01:05:38.980

Reputation: 271

is there an utility for windows to format a drive in udf like the perl script does? – Gianluca P. – 2014-03-21T21:14:34.743