External Hard Drive Compatible With Mac And Pc



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  1. External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows

An external hard drive that supports both Windows and Mac operating systems can be extremely helpful to users who work on both the operating systems. However, Windows was mainly optimized for NTFS (New Technology file system) format, on the other hand, APFS was created for the Mac OS.As we all know NTFS is not compatible with Mac and similarly APFS does not get along with Windows. Fortunately, you could create an external hard disk which is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS with the help of this article. This does not require any third-party application or assistance of any additional software. Let’s get down to make the external hard drive compatible with Mac and Windows.

How to create an external hard disk compatible on Mac and Windows?

Lets us first understand how to make the external hard drive compatible with Mac and Windows? using exFAT and Dual formatting?

  1. exFAT – Formatting a hard drive with the exFAT file system. Since exFAT formatted external hard disk are readable and writable by both the operating systems
  2. Dual formatting – If you are a user who prefers to have both APFS and NTFS file system on a single external hard disk, you can partition and dual format the hard drive.

Steps on how to format an external drive on macOS with exFAT

  1. Connect the drive to the Mac.
  2. Open Disk Utility. The easiest way to do that is to hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in Disk Utility to find the program.
  3. In disk utility, you will have an internal and external drive
  4. Select the drive you want to format and click erase.
  5. Give the partition a name and select exFAT for the format.
  6. Click Erase to finish and you will complete the procedure.

Steps on how to format an external drive on Windows with exFAT

  1. Connect the drive to your Windows PC.
  2. Open the Disk Management tool. You can do that by typing 'disk format' or 'disk management' in Windows search or going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Create and format hard disk partitions.
  3. Right-click on the external drive's partition or unallocated space you want to format and choose New Simple Volume
  4. Follow the wizard to choose a volume size.
  5. Assign a drive letter.
  6. Choose exFAT as the file system in the Format Partition screen.
  7. Give the volume a new name, click next and finish to complete the procedure.

Note - Your exFAT-formatted drive or partition can now be used for both Windows and Mac. Keep in mind that using a drive frequently between Windows and Mac could increase the chances of hard disk corruption, so make sure you have a backup of the data any drive. In case if you happened to lose you will need a reliable third party application to fix the issue.

How to Dual Format an external hard disk?

Let us understand how to make the external hard drive compatible with Mac and Windows using dual formatting?

If the user desires to use NTFS, APFS or HFS+ for any specific reasons and does not want to opt for exFAT, there is another option. Instead of formatting a drive with a single file system, the user can create two partitions and format those with NTFS, APFS, HFS+ or any other file systems.

How to partition external hard disk on Mac?

  1. Connect the external hard disk to the Mac.
  2. Click on Disk utility. Select the drive from the left sidebar, then click the Partition tab.
  3. Under Partition layout, select '2 Partitions.'
  4. The user can adjust the size of the partition based on the desired requirement.
  5. Once adjusting based on the desired storage requirement, the user will able to choose the preferred operating system (NTFS or APFS) and complete the procedure.

How to partition external hard disk on Windows?

  1. Plug the external hard drive into your Windows PC.
  2. Open the Start menu and search for Disk Management.
  3. Select the search result and the Disk Management utility will launch. In the left sidebar, you should see your hard drive and its partitions
  4. Select the drive which you want to be made into a partition. Right-click the Windows partition and select Shrink partition.
  5. In the Format dialog box, under File System, select the desired file system (NTFS). Click OK and complete the format process.

The chances of losing data in this scenario are comparatively high if anything goes wrong in formatting. It is recommended to have a backup of your data before performing this action. If you don’t have a backup you will need a professional hard drive recovery software to recover your lost or formatted data.

Remo hard drive recovery software is one such professional hard drive recovery tool which can easily help you to recover data from your lost or formatted hard disk. The tool supports more than 300 file formats with which you can be sure of recovering files of any format. The tool comes with two types of scan features, Normal scan, and Deep Scan which scans the hard drive sector by sector which ensures hassle-free data recovery.

FAQ

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1. What is Hard format and Quick Format? Is data recovery possible in these scenarios?

  • Hard format - A hard format is an option in Windows, which allows the user to format the whole disk/partition. The disadvantages of this feature are that the data residing on this disk is permanently lost and cannot be recovered
  • Quick Format - Quick format is a feature in which the Windows allows the user to format the disk or partition. Know more on how to perform quick format and recover data after quick format here.

2. How can I use NTFS on Mac?
A. Yes, you can use NTFS on Mac only in read-only mode and it cannot write or overwrite any of these files.

3. How can I use APFS on Windows?
A. Windows is capable of understanding the file format and can read the APFS, but cannot write or overwrite any of these files. https://truerfile966.weebly.com/focus-1-11.html.

HomeBusinessHow To Make An External Drive Compatible With Mac And PC?

“I got a WD My Passport hard drive from my friend as my birthday present. I was so happy to try it on my MacBook Air, only to find I could not save any files to it. I always use an external drive to share files between my MacBook Air and Windows computer in my office. This is the first time that I encountered such a problem. Does anybody know why and how to make the hard drive compatible with Mac and PC?”

Does it sound familiar to you?

Windows and macOS use completely different logics to store and manage files, so some file systems might work well in Windows platform but not necessarily in macOS platform and vice versa. Windows don’t support Apple’s HFS, HFS+ and latest APFS file system at all, while macOS only has read support to Windows NTFS file system.

For cross-platform users who need to share files between PCs and Macs using a portable drive, it is extremely inconvenient with a drive not fully supported by both operating systems.

I will introduce two methods to solve the incompatibility problem.

  • Format the external drive to exFAT.
  • Use a third-party NTFS for Mac driver to enable NTFS write support for macOS.

How to format an external drive to exFAT?

exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) file system is the optimization of FAT32 file system. It offers better compatibility than NTFS file system and eliminates the 4GB file size limit of FAT32 file system. It is a great choice for sharing an external drive between Mac and PC.

Note: Before you proceed with the instructions, remember to back up your data first if you have important files on the drive. That’s because, formatting a disk will write a new file system on your disk and prepare your disk for new data to write on. Your pen drives, SD cards or external hard drives will turn blank and all your files will be gone after formatting. Therefore, back all files up before formatting. If you do not care about data, however, go ahead to format it to exFAT.

You can format the external drive to exFAT both on a PC or a Mac. The instructions below are conducted on a Mac running macOS Mojave.

Step 1: Connect the external drive to the Mac.

Step 2: Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

Step 3: Select the external drive at the left sidebar.

Step 4: Choose Erase at the top tool bar.

Step 5: Give the drive a name.

Step 6: Choose exFAT as Format.

External Hard Drive For Mac And Windows

Step 7: Choose GUID Partition Map as Scheme.

Step 8: Click on Erase button.

After the formatting process is completed, click on “Done” and you will have a drive with exFAT file system. The drive will work seamlessly with Macs and PCs without any third-party software.

How to enable NTFS write support on Mac with a third-party NTFS driver?

If you came cross the problem because you are using a Microsoft NTFS drive, a third-party NTFS mounter can make your NTFS drives compatible with macOS without formatting.

There are free and paid NTFS drivers for Mac available. Free NTFS drivers include FUSE for macOS, NTFS-3G, Mounty and SL-NTFS.

You have to be very familiar with command lines to use free NTFS drivers for Mac. They are less compatible and less secure as well. I recommend to use a paid NTFS driver for Mac, which is easier, more compatible, and more reliable.

Let’s take iBoysoft Drive Manager as an example here to explain how to enable NTFS write support on Mac natively using an NTFS driver for macOS.

iBoysoft Drive Manager is a paid NTFS driver for macOS. It can mount NTFS drives in read-write mode on Mac. NTFS-formatted pen drives, SD cards, and external hard drives will be opened with NTFS write support in the Finder automatically. The write and file transferring speed to NTFS drives is noticeably fast.

Step 1: Download and install iBoysoft Drive Manager on your Mac.

External Hard Drive Compatible With Mac And Pc

After the utility is completely installed, you will see an icon at the top right menu bar.

Step 2: Connect the NTFS drive to the Mac.

You will get a notification that your NTFS drive is successfully mounted.

Step 3: Read-write to the NTFS drive.

The NTFS drive will be opened automatically in read-write mode. You can make any changes to the existing files and save new files to it freely, which are not supported efore.

iBoysoft Drive Manager is far more than an NTFS mounter. As a drive management tool, it can manage multiple USB flash drives, SD cards, memory sticks and external hard drives with one click. It also supports adding network drives manually by providing server address, user names and password and map them as local drives. You can connect and network drives with one click too.

Conclusion

When you are using a removable drive for file sharing between Macs and PCs, you should take file system compatibility into account. You can either choose to format the drive or use third-party software to help you.

However, formatting a disk doesn’t sound as easy as you may expect. Think about the time and other work you must do when you back up a lot of data, reformat several external drives and restore data to them.

In conclusion, third-party drivers will be the easier way to make external drives compatible with Macs and PCs.