How can I read ExFat usb drives with an M3 macbook pro?

Usually it is best to have Disk Utility on macOS erase the drive as exFAT because Windows utilizes some file allocation sizes which macOS does not support....I'm sure the same applies to other third party drivers & utilities as well.

The second possible issue is that Apple changed the exFAT & FAT32 driver by moving it to user space instead of being a kernel driver beginning with macOS 14.x Sonoma. This most likely caused them to rewrite at least part of the driver if not rewrite all the code. There have been a lot of posts on this forum with people having issues with Sonoma & exFAT....more so than what I usually see for the older versions of macOS, but it is hard to say how much is due to the driver change since people seem to just like to complain instead of performing proper troubleshooting or opening official support requests with Apple.

FYI, I have found Linux tends to be much more versatile & even forgiving than macOS in such matters.

Hmm, that is a bit odd.

If the erase doesn't help (still won't mount from the GUI), try creating a new user account. Login to that and see whether or not it behaves the same way.

I can only think the USB drive has some sort of abnormal formatting as macOS can both read and write ExFAT without the need for any special software.

Copy the files off to your PC. Take the drive over to the Mac and use Disk Utility to completely erase and reformat the drive as ExFAT. Take the drive back to the PC and put your files back on it.

Where was the drive formatted?

Try formatting it as exFAT on the Mac.

Interesting stuff.

Just to be contrary 🙂, I plugged in an old 4GB USB drive I formatted as ExFAT quite a few years ago. It mounted and appeared on the desktop immediately on my M2 Pro mini running Sequoia.

I did format it on the Mac under what OS version I couldn't tell you. Though I know for sure it was on a 2018 Intel mini.