Format For Usb Drive For Mac And Pc
How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)? Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Pro tip: If you want to use the external drive for both Mac and PC, you can also select 'ExFAT'. Learn more about the differences between these file. How can the answer be improved?
Posted by Juno to on February 11th, 2018 External hard drive can be very convenient to help us to transfer files among computers. But it is not always so fluent to move files between Mac and PC, namely, between macOS and Windows.
The two different platforms have different default file system: the default file system on Windows is NTFS, while it is HFS+ or APFS on macOS. It should be noted that the HFS+ and APFS are not compatible with Windows and NTFS is read-only on macOS. In order to make our external hard drive seamlessly work on both Mac and PC, we need to format our drive to a file system supported by both platforms.
Three formats that can make external hard drive be compatible with Mac and PC Here are three formats we can choose to make external hard drive be compatible with both Windows and macOS: FAT32, exFAT and NTFS. We can choose the most suitable one according to our own needs. Install steam for windows on mac. Following are the features of the three formats. FAT32 Pros: It can universally work with all versions of macOS and Windows, including a majority of recent and recently obsolete operating systems Cons: It doesn't support files larger than 4GB, drive partition larger than 32GB on Windows, or drive partition larger than 2TB on macOS. How to find games on steam for mac free. So FAT32 is suitable when we want to store files of relatively small sizes and the drive doesn't have a large capacity. Otherwise, FAT32 is not the best choice for us.
ExFAT Pros: The largest partition and file sizes it supportted are nearly unlimited by today's standards. Cons: It is not compatible with older operating systems. We must have macOS 10.6.5 or newer, and PC need to be Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7 or newer. As most users have upgraded operating system, it is actually quite easy to meet to lowest operating system requirements of exFAT. So exFAT can be a very good option to share external hard drive between macOS and Windows. NTFS Pros: It is the default file system on Windows and has faster transfer speed, better performance than FAT32 and exFAT. Cons: By default, NTFS is read-only on macOS.
Actually, we can enable NTFS write support on macOS only with simple method. So read-only can't be a reason for us to give up using NTFS, especially when we have high requirements on transfer speed and performance of drives. This passage will offer easy methods to enable NTFS write support on macOS. How to format external hard drive for Mac and PC on Windows? On Windows computer, we can follow the steps below to format an external hard drive for both Mac and PC. Go to Computer (or My Computer on Windows XP).