Several time recently I've seen UDF suggested as the solution to a cross platform format for a drive used on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP and above.
I've searched here and not found the same suggestion (most are suggesting ntfs-3g which seems to cost money and isn't preinstalled on a Mac).
So my question is: how is this done right, and has anyone done this? Have you then filled up the drive and deleted some files to make space finding that everything works like a real r/w format even though it seems to have been primarily a write once format?
Call me crazy but I'd really like it if the UDF system would also automount and be writable by the logged in user. What I've tried so far (udftools formatting as mentioned by kicsyromy) doesn't address this wish.
ntfs-3g
is free. Its source code is gratis (i.e., available at no cost). It is also free as in freedom.ntfs-3g
is the NTFS driver in Ubuntu! It's slightly technical to manually build/install it on OS X, and Tuxera (its developer) offers a proprietary payware version that is essentially the freentfs-3g
driver built and packaged for easy installation and use on OS X. Without an add-on driver, OS X will only read (not write) NTFS volumes, so you're right to consider another filesystem.COPYING
file is the GNU GPL. Maybe Apple didn't want to do the work integrate it so it be used seamlessly from the Finder. See also tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac and sourceforge.net/projects/catacombae.