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BEST FORMAT TO USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC PC
BEST FORMAT TO USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC DOWNLOAD
BEST FORMAT TO USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC WINDOWS

Click on ‘ Utilities’ > ‘Disk Utility’ to open Disk Utility.

Open ‘ Finder’ and select ‘ Applications’ on the left panel.

Start by connecting the external hard drive to your Mac and follow the steps below.

To format a drive on Mac, you can use the built-in tool called ‘Disk Utility’. Next, let us see how you can format a drive on a Mac.

BEST FORMAT TO USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC WINDOWS

Finally, assign the volume a ‘new name’ and click on Next to complete the format process.Īfter you’ve formatted using ‘ExFAT’ file system, the external hard drive is ready to be used in both Windows and Mac machines.Then ‘format’ the partition as ‘ExFAT’ in the format partition screen.In the next step, assign a ‘drive letter’ to the external drive.The volume size is the same as the maximum volume size that is displayed in the same wizard Choose a ‘volume size’ in the wizard that opens.Identify your ‘external hard drive’ from the list of drives and right click on it.This tool is used to manage all disk drives associated with your computer Press ‘ Windows + X’ and select ‘ Disk Management’.

BEST FORMAT TO USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC PC

First, connect the external hard drive to your PC and make sure you have a backup as formatting will erase all data on the drive. Now that you know whether you want to use FAT32 or ExFAT, we’ll move on to the steps to format an external hard drive.įormatting a drive is pretty straightforward using ‘Disk Management’ utility in Windows. On the other hand, if you’re looking for compatibility with other devices such as Xbox 360 and such, you can use FAT32. For example, FAT32 supports files up to 4 GB, while ExFAT has a limit of 16EB. Generally, ExFAT is preferred over FAT32 as ExFAT has large partition and file size limits and also performs better. To help you select between FAT32 and ExFAT, here are some details. To do this, you will need to format the drive using exFAT or FAT32, which are file systems compatible with both Windows and Mac. Yes, it is possible, but the only requirement is that the file system used is compatible on both these machines.

BEST FORMAT TO USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MAC AND PC DOWNLOAD

You can download it here.You may be thinking if it is possible to use an external hard drive on both PC and Mac. While the above process will probably work for SD cards in most cases, the SD Association (the organization that develops SD cards) has a tool for properly formatting SD cards.

Once you've chosen your desired settings, click 'Start' and watch the magic happen. You can uncheck this if you want the current data to be harder to recover, but if you're very worried about someone recovering old data from the drive, you should format using a dedicated program.

Quick format: This speeds up the formatting process by not overwriting the entire drive with zeros and checking the drive for errors.

Volume label: This is what the drive will be labelled as.

Allocation unit size: Just leave this at whatever is already selected.

(Note that if you intend to put a motherboard BIOS on the USB stick, some boards only look for FAT32 volumes.) However, 32GB is the maximum drive size for FAT32, so Windows might give you an option for exFAT instead, which also has wide compatibility. FAT32 is the best option in most cases, as all operating systems can recognize FAT32 drives. Not every file system will work with every operating system.

File system: This determines the way files are stored on the drive.