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Aiming to have a large internal HDD to store files, and several OSes on separate disks. They all need to read and write to one storage drive.

Ubuntu (13.04+)
Mac OSX (10.8+)
Windows (7+)

What format should the drive be? Would like to avoid buying third party software, here's what I have discerned so far:

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Generally I would now recommend to use exFAT; it's supported on the three major OSes and supports large files and a large number of files.

But if you want to use NTFS, you don't have to buy anything.* See How to copy files to read-only NTFS hard drive on a Mac – there are non-commercial programs to write NTFS on Macs. Just install ntfs-3g via Homebrew and follow the instructions that you're given on the command line. You'll also need osxfuse.

Then, you can use NTFS without problems, and also don't run into an issue with large files. With ntfs-3g, NTFS volumes will be mounted with read/write support, and in practice I've never experienced problems with it.

* There are commercial variants that promise better speed and support, like Tuxera and Paragon, but they are not strictly required.

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If I had to do something like that I will go for a spereate NAS drive. You can setup up FreeNAS. This has the ability that you can write from different OS'es to one storage. You may need a seperate machine for this, apart from the one with the 3 OS'es on.

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    The OP does not want to buy third party software… so I don't quite understand why you're suggesting to buy a separate machine just to share files on a computer?
    – slhck
    Commented Oct 26, 2013 at 9:56
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    Software != hardware. Any 6 year old machine would do the trick and knowing that OP needs to work with 3 OSes shows that he is not new to the computer world. Thus a big possibility of him having old tower, laptop, even raspberry pi.
    – Audrius
    Commented Oct 26, 2013 at 11:17
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just do FAT 32 with no security will be okay.

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  • a better solution is to partition them to 3 drive, there is no point to transfer file between difference OS.
    – user218473
    Commented Oct 26, 2013 at 9:37
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    There are quite a few reasons to transfer files between different OSes – if only because you have different tools on different platforms to work with the same dataset.
    – slhck
    Commented Oct 26, 2013 at 9:57
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    This would work! But limited to 4GiB
    – xxjjnn
    Commented Oct 26, 2013 at 11:01
  • I will just put those thing in google drive. by the way, i never multi-boot since VM was there. and when using VM, it just drag and drop.
    – user218473
    Commented Oct 26, 2013 at 11:16
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I agree with StBlade, it seems to me that this is the best option.

This being said, if you are adamant on keeping your disk attached to your pc, I would go with NTFS, which is a journaled, fully POSIX-compliant file-system. Even the problem with Mac OS is probably less severe than you might think because, short of buying a commercial solution, you can enable writing on NTFS systems on Mac OS, for instance following this guide.

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