Format external drive for mac and windows

#FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC AND WINDOWS HOW TO#

For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008.

#FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC AND WINDOWS HOW TO#

Either head to Applications Utilities, or tap Command + Space and start typing. Do you wish to format hard drive for Mac and PC, but canвЂ™t find a solution Read this stepwise tutorial and learn how to format HDD for Mac and Windows like a pro. Compare the different options for formatting an external hard drive to work with Windows and Mac. I'd love for someone to tell me differently. The best ways to format an external drive for Windows and Mac. There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones.

Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. If you prefer or plan to set a cross-platform supported format for your storage devices, ExFAT is the best. FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.Д«e careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the 'Options.' button below the 'Partition Layout' control on the Partition pane). Format USB/External Hard Drive to ExFAT for Windows and Mac with The Best ExFAT Formatter On this page, we explained the best format for USB and external hard drives on both Windows and Mac is ExFAT.

Format external drive for mac and windows