Usb drive format for mac and windows xp mac os#

This format didn't seem to help too much, either, though. I copied the VM back over to the flash drive, and that copy transferred solidly at 10.5 MB/sec (not as good as my HDDs, but still nothing horrible).

Usb drive format for mac and windows xp mac os#

I then reformatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) (though I wish I could've formatted it as not journaled, since I could sacrifice data integrity for the little performance boost in this case). but that provided abysmal performance for a VM in Parallels right-clicking on the desktop would take seconds to simply pop up the contextual menu (and this was about 10 minutes afterВ the machine had completely finished launching). not so fast!ДЄnyways, for my first crack, I tried formatting the drive as an ExFAT drive, with a Master Boot Record, thinking it would be nice to also be able to use the drive with the occasional PC I run into. Write speed wouldn't be anything to brag about, but writing shouldn't happen all that often when simply opening up Internet Explorer-I hope!. Also, the little drive should have very good read performance, since it's not a spinning platter. I found a cheap 32GB USB flash drive that only sticks out of my MacBook Air half an inch, and copies at a consistent rate of 30MB/second (which is quite sufficient for most tasks). However, there's no way I'm going to lug around an external hard drive and USB cable (and maybe power adapter) just so I can test things in Internet Explorer (basically, the only use I have for Windows). I have plenty of external USB and FireWire storage (over 6 TB), and running VMs in either Parallels or VMWare Fusion works great (very highly performant) off any of these external drives.

I have a MacBook Air with a dainty 128GB SSD drive, so I try to keep large files that I rarely use on external drives.

I thought I'd post my experience here, for the benefit of others, because I couldn't find a whole lot of information about this specific use of an external USB flash drive.