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Forum: General Discussion

Topic: External SSD on Macbook Air M2
When I select my 2TB m.2 external SSD it reports that it is formatted for use on CDJ's.
It was formatted as exFat and works fine except when trying to access as a Local Drive.
Is exFat the correct format?
 

Posted Mon 25 Mar 24 @ 11:46 pm
ExFAT IMHO is the worst format to use for a drive.
If you're going to use the drive only on your MAC, then format it as APFS
If you plan to use it on both MAC and Windows systems, then format it as NTFS and invest on a program like Paragon to be able to write on the drive when it's connected on your MAC.

ExFAT unfortunately is not a stable file system. It lacks "self heeling" properties that other formats like NTFS and APFS have. ExFAT can get corrupted very easily.
 

Posted Wed 27 Mar 24 @ 1:28 pm
I agree with George. Last autumn I bought my first 2tb Crucial X9 SSD which was preformatted ExFat for compatibility with both Mac & PCs. I have three Macs, the first two I installed Paragon's NTFS for Mac and used it successfully for over 10 years. I have two spinning 2tb WD Passport drives that were formatted NTFS. Instead of rebuying the Paragon program for the third time, I thought I would reformat all drives to ExFat. I had trouble with them getting corrupted when unmounting them. I reformatted the SSD to APFS and what a difference, it mounts/dismounts instantly and is so much faster at loading songs. I will reformat the spinning drives to NTFS and buy the Paragon program for my M1 Silicon Mac again, it's worth every penny. I'm still finding corruption in my database after several months where sometimes the wrong Artist & Title is attached to a song, I'm slowly getting through them as they are random.
 

Posted Wed 27 Mar 24 @ 9:03 pm