Most stable external HDD format?

[Cozwin]

Hi,

got a 1tb HDD and had no problems, but recently formated it to exfat and had it die literally the next day, recovered all files luckily, but a big pain,

so what should I use for stability and speed, this is my backup drive, for windows 7 mainly but may be accessed from mac osx and linux at some point.

So what should I use?

[Blackmage]

Fat32, yes you have a 4gb file size limit but mac os and windows can read the format ok.

[kingpotnoodle]

Fat32, yes you have a 4gb file size limit but mac os and windows can read the format ok.

Windows 7 won't make you a FAT32 above 32GB IIRC, you'll need something else to format it.

NTFS is readable at least by all OS, writable by most, exFAT is fine on OSX I think, but FAT32 is probably the most compatible.

A file system change shouldn't have killed an otherwise healthy disk, there may have been something else wrong with it, or the way you ejected it corrupted the file system structure.