What Is The Best Format To Format A External Hard Drive For Mac
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. Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly. Need to access or transfer files between Mac and PC?
If you want to transfer files from a Mac to Windows PC and vice versa using an external portable hard drive then you have to have the external drive formatted in a file system both OS's can read. 1 Why to Format External Hard Drive for Mac As it has been discussed there are numerous issues that are associated with the formatting of an external hard drive. This section of the tutorial deals with each and every one of them in great detail.
As simple as this task sounds, it’s not very straightforward for inexperienced users. Since 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. In fact, there are four ways you can format an external or USB flash drive to achieve varying degrees of compatibility between Macs and PCs. Let’s take a look at them: HFS+ 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. But while HFS+ is the best way to format drives for use on Macs, Windows does not support it. 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. When you install MacDrive on a Windows PC, it will be able to seamlessly read & write to HFS+ drives.
Format External Drive Windows 10
This isn’t a good solution if you need your drive to work on any PC without installing software, though. NTFS The native Windows file system is NTFS, which is only partially compatible with Mac OS X. Macs can read files on NTFS drives, but it cannot write to them. So if you need to get files from a PC to your Mac, NTFS is a decent option. However, you won’t be able to move files in the other direction, from Mac to PC. Best vpn for macbook air.