1. External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Interchangeable 2018
2. Format External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc
3. Set Up External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc

If you have both Windows and Mac computers in your office, it's important to understand their different storage requirements before buying an external hard drive. Both operating systems use different formats for reading and writing to a hard drive. The only hard drive format that can be reliably used by both is called FAT32, or MS-DOS FAT as it's called on Mac computers. Even if your external hard drive doesn't come pre-formatted in FAT32, you can format it yourself using either a Mac or Windows PC.

1. The 8 Best External Hard Drives of 2019. Search the site GO. Computer Components. But it means that when you upgrade to a new computer, your external hard drive will stay usable. Check out our guide to the best USB. There are a number of advantages to exFAT drives — namely that they can be recognized by both Windows and Mac.
2. Method 3: Format external hard drive for Mac and PC. Want to use external hard drive under both Windows PC and Mac? In this case, you should consider the hurdle that these operating systems support different filesystems. The default file system in Windows is NTFS, while Mac OS users HFS.
3. I have an external hard drive that I need to encrypt and then be able to read and write on both mac and pc. I have multiple hard drives so if the hd needs to be wiped clean I can do that.

For maximum compatibility, back up everything from the external hard drive onto your Mac. Open Disk Utility, select the external hard drive and go to Partition. Under Volume Scheme, choose 1 Partition, then click Options. Choose Master Boot Record. Then choose MSDOS under the Format menu. Then click Apply. Your hard drive should work on either computer at that point, as well as others you may try to use it on. The Best External Hard Drives for Mac in 2019. Mac is not all that different from buying one for your Windows PC. To use your external drive with computers that run both operating systems. Sep 26, 2018  After that, you can use your external hard drive on both Mac and Windows machine. AOMEI Partition Assistant is such a great simple tool for formatting external hard drive for Mac and Windows. Besides, you can use it to manage your hard drive partitions such as resize partition, delete partition, split partition, merge partitions, etc. Jan 24, 2011  If you want yours to seamlessly work with both Macs and PCs, your external drive. How to format an external drive to work seamlessly with Macs and PCs without third party software. Guide: How to format an external drive to work seamlessly with Macs and PCs without third party software. January 24, 2011 Guides 5 Comments.

FAT32

The FAT32 format is compatible with both Mac and Windows operating systems. FAT32 has a few disadvantages. It can't store any single file larger than 4GB. It's more prone to disk errors and its larger cluster sizes make its storage slightly less efficient than other format types. However, if you want to read and write files from a Windows and a Mac computer to the same external hard drive, this is usually your best option.

Other Formats

External hard drives formatted specifically for Windows usually use NTFS. Mac OS X can read NTFS drives but can't write to them. Unlike FAT32, NTFS supports Windows file permissions and is more stable. External hard drives designed specifically for Mac computers are usually formatted in HFS+. There are tools available online that allow you to write to NTFS from Mac OS X and tools that allow you to write to HFS+ from a Windows computer, but these tools can be difficult to manage and require some technical expertise. Microsoft's successor to FAT32, exFAT, is compatible with recent versions of Windows and Mac OS and removes the 4GB limitation, but brings its own set of trade-offs (see Resources).

Formatting From a Mac

If you want to format a blank external drive from a Mac computer, launch the Disk Utility, located in the Applications Utility folder. After you select the drive, click the 'Erase' button at the top of the window, and then select 'MS-DOS (FAT)' from the Format menu. If you want to only format a portion of the hard drive, click the 'Partition' button and then use the controls to select a partition size and which format you prefer. If you select a Mac OS format for the partition, it won't be readable from a WIndows PC.

Formatting From a PC

To format a blank drive from a PC, you can use the Windows 8 Disk Management Utility. To open this utility, right-click the bottom-left corner of the desktop and select 'Disk Management' from the menu. After you locate the drive in the list on the left, right-click its name, select 'Format' and then select 'FAT32' from the File System menu. To format only a part of the drive, create a new partition on the drive, right-click the drive name and select 'New Simple Volume.' The New Simple Volume Wizard opens to guide you through the process. Any partition you make that is not in FAT32 is visible from a Mac computer, but the Mac can't write to it.

About the Author

A published author and professional speaker, David Weedmark has advised businesses and governments on technology, media and marketing for more than 20 years. He has taught computer science at Algonquin College, has started three successful businesses, and has written hundreds of articles for newspapers and magazines throughout Canada and the United States.

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If you've switched to the Mac, welcome aboard. Your old external Windows PC drive will work great on the Mac. Apple has built OS X Yosemite and some previous OS X releases with the ability to read from those disks just fine. If you're using such a drive and you'd like to write new data to them, you'll find you can't unless you add new software. Fortunately, you don't have to spend a dime.

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One option is to back up your old Windows external drive (using Time Machine or another method). Reformat the drive using Apple's Disk Utility software and the company's HFS+ file system instead. Then you can restore the backed up data to the drive.

Even if the backed up and restored files originally came from a PC, they'll be stored on the drive using a file system the Mac fully understands. That way the drive will be fully Mac-compatible without any need for you to modify the operating system of the Mac to get it to work properly.

Obviously that solution doesn't work for everyone. Maybe the drive you're using has to be used with a PC occasionally. Whatever the case, the good news is that it's not a show-stopper: There are a few utilities out there that will enable Macs to write to mounted NTFS volumes.

Tuxera's NTFS for Mac is one of the best ways to do it. It uses smart caching to keep data transfer as fast as possible and works with every OS X version since 10.4 (Tiger). NTFS for Mac costs $31, and you can download a demo first to see how it does.

Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac 12 is another excellent choice. It includes several additional utilities for people who need to tinker or repair, to enable you to format drives with NTFS, check NTFS partition integrity, fix errors, and more. NTFS for Mac costs $19.95.

If you're a DIYer and you'd like to go the free route, you'll find a Sourceforge project called NativeNTFS-OSX that gets the job done. NativeNTFS isn't for rookies: It's a bash script that needs to run from the Terminal command line and requires you to have root (administrator) access to your computer.

An easier way to go is to download OS X Fuse, a third-party software tool that extends the Mac's file system capabilities. Follow the directions on the OS X Fuse website to download and configure the software. Follow the instructions to download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X, whose development seems stopped right now but still works in Yosemite. Once OS X Fuse and NTFS-3G are installed, your Mac should be able to read and write to NTFS disks just fine.

External Hard Drive For Mac And Pc Interchangeable 2018

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Format External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc

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