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Can an external hard drive be used for both Mac and PC?
While Windows and macOS primarily use their respective proprietary file systems, both support other file systems as well. This means that you can take an external hard drive and format it with the exFAT file system and it will then be readable and writable to both you_r Windows PC and your Ma_c.
What format reads both Mac and PC?
Windows uses NTFS while Mac OS uses HFS, and they’re incompatible with each other. However, you can format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac by using the exFAT filesystem.
How do I make my external hard drive writable for Mac and PC?
Click the “Privilege” pull-down menu, and then click “Read and Write” to make the external hard drive both readable and writeable, or click “Write Only” if you want to turn it into a “Drop Box,” which the user can only write files to, but not read files.
How to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows?
Sometimes, you may want to try Format directly to format your external hard drive partition to exFAT for Mac and Windows. However, you can find that there is no exFAT option and the only option under the window of Format > File system is NTFS (Default).
Is there an external hard drive compatible with Mac?
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.
Which is better to format for both Windows and Mac?
In this guide we’re using exFAT instead of FAT32, another filesystem that both Windows and Mac can read and write to, because FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB (exabytes). exFAT also performs better than FAT32. You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine.
How do I format an external hard drive to exFAT?
Here we take an example of formatting external hard drive to exFAT in a Windows 10 PC. Step 1. Connect your external hard drive to your Windows 10 PC. Step 2. Open the Disk Management tool by right-clicking This PC -> Manage -> Disk Management. Step 3. In Disk Management, you’ll see your external hard drive as partition or unallocated space.