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What format hard drive for both windows and mac for mac#
What format hard drive for both windows and mac mac os x#

Another option, for those who use both Windows and Mac OS regularly, is to partition your hard drive and have a portion of the drive formatted for each OS.

What format hard drive for both windows and mac for mac#

Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. There are tools available to use NTFS on a Mac (Fuse) or HFS on PC (HFSExplorer). To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC. Windows will not detect this file system without a third party utility. Some older drives are formatted specifically for PCs, some. Newer Seagate and LaCie branded external drives come preformatted with the exFAT file system, which allows it to be used on both Mac and Windows without reformatting the drive. Only use this option if the drive will only be used in Mac OS. This article explains about file systems and provides instruction to format a drive on Windows and Mac.

Mac OS Extended is the native solution for Mac users and has the max file size of any of them.

What format hard drive for both windows and mac mac os x#

It has a much larger max file size but is read-only on Mac OS X (unless you install a third party NTFS read/write utility). NTFS format is the file system Windows likes to use by default for internal drives running the operating system or used as a secondary storage drive.Older operating systems might require an update to properly read and write to a USB drive with an exFAT file system. It doesn’t have the 4GB file size limit and it’s compatible with most Windows and Mac operating systems. exFAT is the ideal file system for USB flash drives.

If you want to format it for use with the time machine, it will require you to select the HFS+ option from the format list available.

It is the most compatible file system for older/modern computers (PC and Mac) plus gaming consoles and other devices with a USB port. If you want to format the drive to use on both Mac and Windows systems, you’ll choose the ExFAT from the list format options. Most USB flash drives will have a FAT32 file system out-of-box.

FAT32 is a common option you’ll hear because it’s recognised by both Mac and Windows operating systems, but it offers no security and caps files at 4GB in size.

The file systems most commonly used in USB flash drives are: When formatting your drive, it’s important to understand the different formatting options available for your ideal use.