Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly.This saves space on your new PCs hard drive and leaves your files and. For a hard drive to be able to be read from and written to on both a Windows and macOS computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format.If you have an external hard drive or USB flash drive that you’d like to use on both Macs and Windows PCs, choosing the right file system to format the drive can be confusing. Format hard drive for mac free download - Format USB Or Flash Drive Software, Hard Drive Upgrader, Hard Drive Inspector Professional, and many more programs.
Format A Hard Drive For A On Windows Mac OS X AndSince Mac OS X and Windows use totally different file systems, the way a drive is formatted can determine what type of computer it will work with. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.Need to access or transfer files between Mac and PC? As simple as this task sounds, it’s not very straightforward for inexperienced users. They are incompatible with each other. Windows uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS. Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems.Formatting a drive on Windows is quite simple.Mac OS X’s native file system is HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended), and it’s the only one that works with Time Machine. Now that we know the good and bad about every file system, let see how to format a drive in Windows, MAC, and Linux. Let’s take a look at them: HFS+How to Format an External Hard drive or Pen drive.NTFSThe native Windows file system is NTFS, which is only partially compatible with Mac OS X. This isn’t a good solution if you need your drive to work on any PC without installing software, though. When you install MacDrive on a Windows PC, it will be able to seamlessly read & write to HFS+ drives. If you’re only going to be using your external or USB flash drive with certain PCs – such as at home or the office – you might be interested in a program called MacDrive.Case closed, right? Well, not so fast. It works with all versions of Mac OS X and Windows. FAT32The most universally supported way to format your drive is with the FAT32 file system. However, you won’t be able to move files in the other direction, from Mac to PC. So if you need to get files from a PC to your Mac, NTFS is a decent option. Much better, except for that pesky 4GB limit. If you format it from a Mac running 10.7 Lion, the drive partition can be up to 2TB. If you format your FAT32 drive in Windows, the drive partition cannot be larger than 32GB. The other limitation is the total size of the partition. This is a deal-breaker if you work with huge files. For example, you cannot save files that are larger than 4GB on a FAT32-formatted drive. Soundcloud mac downloadIf you know you’ll be using computers running updated versions of these operating systems, exFAT is the clear best choice. Any Mac running 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) or 10.7 (Lion) supports exFAT, while PCs running Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows 7 are compatible. Awesome, it’s perfect! Almost… since exFAT is fairly new, it isn’t compatible with older Macs and PCs. Go to “utilities” and start the “terminal” app. So you need to activate it:1. There are different ways to do that.Mac OS X is actually capable of writing to a NTSF drive, just not by default (don’t ask!).
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