It seems you have an answer that addresses you question. I'm posting this as potentially "another answer" to augment @Ephemeral's answer, and because it's something that may be overlooked occasionally:

If you are using Raspberry Pi and samba as a file server, perhaps the easiest and most reliable file system to use is the RPi's native ext4 filesystem. In other words, format your external drive(s) as ext4 instead of exfat, fat32, ntfs, etc. This provides all the advantages inherent in the ext4 filesystem, and allows all samba clients access (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux - any OS that supports SMB).

My personal experience using exfat with samba on RPi has been fraught with crappy little issues. It can be made to work, but I see nagging issues; e.g file names are changed by 'the system'.

NOTE: If your external drive is one that may also be mounted directly by another OS (Windows or Mac primarily), then ext4 may not be a good choice. But for serving via samba running on RPi, the samba software will "translate" the ext4 filesystem to SMB - just as it does for any other disk-based filesystem.

It seems you have an answer that addresses your question. I'm posting this as potentially "another answer" to augment @Ephemeral's answer, and because it's something that may be overlooked occasionally:

If you are using Raspberry Pi and samba as a file server, perhaps the easiest and most reliable file system to use is the RPi's native ext4 filesystem. In other words, format your external drive(s) as ext4 instead of exfat, fat32, ntfs, etc. This provides all the advantages inherent in the ext4 filesystem, and allows all samba clients access (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux - any OS that supports SMB).

My personal experience using exfat with samba on RPi has been fraught with crappy little issues. It can be made to work, but I see nagging issues; e.g file names are changed by 'the system'.

NOTE: If your external drive is one that may also be mounted directly by another OS (Windows or Mac primarily), then ext4 may not be a good choice. But for serving via samba running on RPi, the samba software will "translate" the ext4 filesystem to SMB - just as it does for any other disk-based filesystem.

It seems you have an answer that addresses you question. I'm posting this as potentially "another answer" to augment @Ephemeral's answer, and because it's something that may be overlooked occasionally:

If you are using Raspberry Pi and samba as a file server, perhaps the easiest and most reliable file system to use is the RPi's native ext4 filesystem. In other words, format your external drive(s) as ext4 instead of exfat, fat32, ntfs, etc. This provides all the advantages inherent in the ext4 filesystem, and allows all samba clients access (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux - any OS that supports SMB).

It seems you have an answer that addresses you question. I'm posting this as potentially "another answer" to augment @Ephemeral's answer, and because it's something that may be overlooked occasionally:

If you are using Raspberry Pi and samba as a file server, perhaps the easiest and most reliable file system to use is the RPi's native ext4 filesystem. In other words, format your external drive(s) as ext4 instead of exfat, fat32, ntfs, etc. This provides all the advantages inherent in the ext4 filesystem, and allows all samba clients access (i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux - any OS that supports SMB).

My personal experience using exfat with samba on RPi has been fraught with crappy little issues. It can be made to work, but I see nagging issues; e.g file names are changed by 'the system'.

NOTE: If your external drive is one that may also be mounted directly by another OS (Windows or Mac primarily), then ext4 may not be a good choice. But for serving via samba running on RPi, the samba software will "translate" the ext4 filesystem to SMB - just as it does for any other disk-based filesystem.