10.6.5 brings ExFAT - makes sharing files between OSX and Windows easier!

EDIT on 02/16/2011 – It works again! 10.6.6. Seems the bug was ironed out on 10.6.6. Thanks all who reported it. I didn’t have the chance to test it out on a Win7 machine (as I was fresh out of one).

EDIT on 12/09/2010 – As Clinton pointed out in the comments below, a partition formatted in OSX as exFAT will in fact not work on Windows 7. You can however, format the partition in Windows 7 as exFAT to make it r/w on OSX. Sorry for this! I will update when I know more.

What a wonderful surprise last evening with the release of 10.6.5, especially for us dual-booters – support for ExFAT in OSX! Windows 7 and Vista SP1 have supported it for months, as did the 27″ iMac (mid 2010), but with 10.6.5, this has been released for all. The possibilities are just mind-boggling.

For the first time ever, native support for reading/writing files on a partition by both OSX and Windows! This has been a pipe dream, that has worked dodgily at best. One has had to resort to MacDrive on Windows to read/write OSX partitions, and poor OSX folk have had to wrestle with NTFS-3G drivers – don’t even get me started on how much I hate NTFS-3G. But with ExFAT, OSX and Windows 7 can work with the same partition with no extra software required. Wow. Just wow.

To get started, just format a partition on your drive, either on OSX or Windows 7 in ExFAT and watch the fireworks! Things like these bring out the geek in me. This alone is worth the update to 10.6.5. GO GET IT!