You use a Windows PC for your personal device, but a friend has asked you to copy about 1 TB of legally downloaded movies to a USB flash drive so they can watch them on a macOS laptop. Which file-system format should you choose for the flash drive so that both Windows and macOS can read and write the data and large movie files will copy without size-limit errors?
exFAT is natively supported by Windows 10/11 and modern macOS versions (10.6.5 +), and it supports very large volumes and files (theoretical file size limit ≈ 16 EB). FAT32 is also cross-platform, but it has a per-file size limit of 4 GB - 1 byte and, on many GUI tools, a practical formatting limit of 32 GB, making it unsuitable for 1 TB of movie files. NTFS is fully writable in Windows but is read-only in macOS by default, and EXT/Ext4 is not supported natively by either OS. Therefore, exFAT is the best choice.
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