iPhone 15 does not recognize exFAT USB drive in Files App

Hi Everyone,

It is frustrating to report that Apple iPhone15 does not recognize exFAT formatted USB drive. Every time I plug in the SSD I can see the drive gets connected for less than a second and then disconnects. Apple says they support exFAT formatted drives with single partition.

On the other hand, when I format the drive in NTFS the drive gets recognized but comes up as read-only. This won't work as I want to be able to write. Interestingly Apple says they can't recognize NTFS.

I located another online discussion where someone complained about the exact same thing earlier but there was no resolution. This is indeed very frustrating. Looks like Apple is falling the way of old Microsoft.

iPhone 15 Plus

Posted on Feb 1, 2024 5:17 PM

Similar questions

2 replies

Feb 1, 2024 7:57 PM in response to bigbluefont

Connect external storage devices to iPhone - Apple Support

Out to the box, Macs can read NTFS volumes, but cannot write to them. I don't think that iPhones officially support NTFS at all. NTFS is a Microsoft-proprietary filesystem, and I'm not sure if it is completely documented, so I would not expect to see built-in write support for it on Macs (let alone iPhones) any time in the near future.

bigbluefont Author

Level 1

9 points

Feb 1, 2024 8:43 PM in response to Servant of Cats

And with this reply let the BS begin. I am looking for exFAT to get recognized. I don’t need to use NTFS. But exFAT support is buggy as in Apple engineering has screwed up in writing the code.

Here is some clue:

When connecting to iPhone, exFAT does not get recognized. So I took out the drive and connected it to a windows machine. What I see is that Apple iPhone has created a directory called Spotlight. This I think is their feature that checks IO requests etc. So iPhone does try and also writes to exFAT but due to some bug does not recognize exFAT.

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iPhone 15 does not recognize exFAT USB drive in Files App