You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”. And you can only do this with exFAT as with FAT32 Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup won’t work. FAT32 or exFAT? You can format your external hard drive in both – exFAT and FAT32. They both will work just fine. Mac and PC can read and write on both.
However, each of these filesystems has their own pros and cons. FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit, but exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB, that’s more than you will ever need. If you have to work with large video clips, games or any other kind of massive files, FAT32 may not be the best choice. Many still choose FAT32 over exFAT despite its slower performance, as it’s also compatible with Linux Os and is supported on many consoles. Once you have done with formatting, your external hard drive will be able to write and read files from both a PC and Mac. The resulting FAT32 file system will be compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, and Windows including back to 95. This is one of the most widely recognized file system formats.
FAT32 – a file system normally used on USB disks. exFAT – a newer file system optimized for flash devices and has improved performance overFAT32 Why I can’t use NTFS on Mac? The default file system for Windows is NTFS (New Technology File System).
Macs that run Snow Leopard or Lion can read data from drives that are formatted as NTFS. However, they can’t write. To make your Mac compatible writing on NTFS you have to get and install a third-party driver. So in the end, it’s possible to make your NTFS external hard drive compatible with Mac. But we advise to just format it to “FAT” file system as it’s less time consuming and easier. Windows 7 can’t read nor write files to external drives that are formatted as HFS.
To do so you also have to install third-party like. How to format an External Drive in Windows 1) Connect the drive to your Windows PC. 2) Open Disk Management.
Open up Windows Explorer and right-click on your drive in the sidebar. Choose 'Format'. In the 'File System' dropdown, choose exFAT instead of NTFS. Click Start and close this window when finished.
3) Right click on unallocated or any other disk partition and select “ New Simple Volume” 4) Choose your desired size 5) Assign your external hard drive with any letter. 6) Choose exFAT as the file system. 7) Follow the instructions and at the end click “ Finish“ How to Format an External Drive in OS X 1) Connect your external hard drive to the Mac. 2) Open Disk Utility. You can do this quickly by pressing CMD and the spacebar at the same time. Then type in “Disk Utility”.
3) Select the drive you want to format. 4) Click the Partition tab. 6) Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition. 7) Click Options, Select Master Boot Record, and click OK. 8) Name the hard drive with a name of your choice. 9) Click the Format drop-down menu. 10) Select exFAT or MS-DOS FAT(FAT32).
11) At last press Apply, then click on Partition. WD My Book would be best for desktop, Seagate Backup Plus Slim would be one of the best portable hard drives. Both are all-around decent drives and will do fine for any backup, pictures included. As for cross-platform encryption, if you intend to use the same drive on both Mac and Windows, the best option would be using a cross-platform compatible encryption tool, like, while formatting the drive in exFAT to avoid compatibility issues. This is because Windows won’t recognize Mac’s native encryption and vice versa. VeraCrypt is well-renowned, so it should function well without any problems, just be prepared to learn how to use the tool.
Try testing this setup with just a couple files before you perform entire backups.
Advertisement If you’ve just purchased a new external hard drive for your Mac, it’s important to take the time to prepare your hard drive for use with Mac OS X. Like a lot of operating systems, Mac OS X offers only limited support for other file systems. Without proper preparation, you might even have issues writing files to the drive. Between Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, there are a lot of Different hard drives and operating systems may use different file systems.
Here's what that means and what you need to know. On the market, and each operating system has its own preference. On Windows, you’re likely to encounter FAT and NTFS, Linux normally goes with ext3 or ext4 and Mac OS X uses HFS+. Different File Systems NTFS, FAT and HFS+ are the main file systems you’ll need to know about. We’ll go over these one by one, considering the pros and cons of each and how you get them to play nice with Mac OS X: NTFS Windows is still the most used operating system around. As a result, most store-bought hardware is also configured for use on Windows computers.
NTFS is the main file system that’s used on Windows computers these days, and most new external hard drives will be formatted to NTFS. Mac OS X offers only limited support for NTFS out of the box. You’ll be able to see and read files on NTFS disks, but unable to write your own files to the disk as Apple would have to license the technology from Microsoft (which means paying them a fee). To get your computer up and running with NTFS, you’ll need a third-party NTFS driver – a piece of software that tells your computer how to communicate with the drive. Perhaps the most famous third-party NTFS driver is (shown above).
For the reasonable price of $20, you’ll get near-seamless NTFS support on your Mac. A free alternative comes in the form of NTFS-3G. Although the project is no longer actively supported, you can still use it to gain NTFS support on your Mac. The process is a little more convoluted, especially for new Mac computers, but Justin Pot’s article shows you all the steps to Plugging in a USB hard drive and finding out you cannot write to it is frustrating, but easy to fix. on your Mac. FAT32 and exFAT Although NTFS is mostly running the game these days, Windows used to revolve around FAT. It’s an older file system with one main disadvantage: a FAT drive can’t store files larger than 4GB.
There are advantages, too: FAT is by far the most supported file system. Windows, Mac and Linux all work with FAT out of the box nowadays. ExFAT is an extension of the FAT file system that does away with the 4GB file size cap. Both Windows and Mac OS X computers play well with exFAT these days. For the standard user, exFAT is a good way to render your drive compatible with these two operating systems. However, you’ll need to install exFAT drivers to be able to use it on Linux computers.
HFS+ By default your Mac will use HFS+, also known as Mac OS Extended. Because Mac OS X is designed with HFS+ in mind, an HFS+ formatted drive will give you the least amount of troubles. It has most of the advantages of NTFS, but without the hiccups that come with reverse engineered NTFS drivers. Which To Choose It all boils down to this: on what operating systems do you intend to use your external hard drive? If you’ll only use it on Mac OS X, HFS+ (or Mac OS Extended) is the obvious choice. To make your drive compatible with other operating systems, you’ll need a different file system.
NTFS works like a charm if you’re willing to install third-party drivers on your Mac. Keep in mind that other Mac computers (without NTFS drivers) will still be unable to write to the drive in that case. Out of the box compatibility is provided for FAT/FAT32, but with that also comes a 4GB file size limit. ExFAT gets rid of that file size limit at the cost of compatibility with Linux computers. How To Format A New Hard Drive Once you’ve decided which file system is best for you, you might have to reformat your external drive. Start by opening Applications Utilities Disk Utility. At the left hand side column, select your external drive.
In the Erase tab, select the file system and name your drive. When you’re ready, click Erase Be aware that this will remove all files that are currently on your drive!
If you want to add multiple partitions to your drive, you can find similar formatting options in the Partition tab. You’ll notice there are a few different options for Mac OS Extended. In general, you’ll want Mac OS Extended (Journaled). You can use (Journaled, Encrypted) to encrypt the entire drive.
However, this will make them a tad harder to work with in Disk Utility and won’t allow other computers to access the files. Also, if you lose the password, you won’t have a way of accessing your files. Never choose (Case-sensitive), unless you know what you’re doing. A lot of applications can’t properly work with case-sensitive file paths. What filesystem are you going with to prepare your external hard drive, and why? Let us know in the comments section below! Image credit: stu360 Explore more about:,.