[rbreaves]

Exfat is not good for the kinds of ssd’s that go into computers. Flash drives yes though.

Imo it depends on what’s important to you but from purely a data recovery standpoint I’d say pick NTFS & use tuxera on the Mac & Linux has write support built in. This way you can have a 3rd partition w/ data shared btwn the 2 OS’s. Of course if your against that you can use hfs or ext4 & figure out how to mount those. NTFS will of course not work w/ the permission structure of either well.

[greattsclerouse]

thanks. I've read different stuff pretty much every where I go so thought it might be worthwhile to ask this community about their thoughts. appreciate your input.

[rbreaves]

Yea, I just started to put my VMs on a 4th partition, 200gb on a 1TB so that I can share VMs btwn 3 OS's natively, macOS, Windows or Linux. I picked NTFS for that scenario as I am more confident in ALL 3 being able to read and write to it properly - however I know there will always be a risk of data corruption when having an OS read a format that is not native to it. I still want the pro of being able to write large files though, so I've made the trade off.

One thing that I have also done is ensured that my actual Windows partition will never be mounted in write mode from any other OS by changing some settings. The VM partition is read-write obviously.

Windows for now is my primary OS but that may switch to Linux. In any event if the 200gb isn't enough space then I will likely just shuffle things around under Windows so that the VMs I am currently working with will be available to all 3. All in all I like this solution best, I dedicate the most space to my primary and I dedicate just enough to the rest while have the shared space as well. I feel confident this will not result in having to reload an entire OS, which is something I want to actively avoid and is a risk with dual or triple boot systems.