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My router (Archer C2) has a USB port which allows me to connect an external hard drive, which can be made accessible as a network drive. I have a computer running Windows 10 and a Macbook, and I want both of these devices to be able to use the network drive (for backup purposes mainly).

I'm facing two problems:

  1. The Archer C2 only allows the connected hard drive to be formatted as FAT32 or NTFS.

  2. Mac does not work well with NTFS (can only read files, not write files), and I don't want to use FAT32 since I want to store files larger than 4GB (video files).

Is there any way to solve this problem? So far I've tried formatting my hard drive as ExFAT, but it is not recognized by the router when formatted this way.

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  • "Is there any way to solve this problem?" - Install a NTFS driver on MacOS since you don't want to use FAT32.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Feb 26, 2018 at 15:11

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The MAC and the Windows PC connect to it using the SMB/CIFS network protocol.
They will not talk to the disk directly. The Archer is doing that on behalf of the clients. The clients won't see the actual formatting of the disk and won't be able to tell what filesystem is really used on the disk.

So you can just use NTFS to get the benefit of the large file support.

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