format for mac and windows external drive on pc

FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC HOW TO
FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC MAC OS X
FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC MAC OS
FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC INSTALL
FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC DRIVERS

Macs running Snow Leopard or Lion can read from drives formatted as NTFS, but they can’t write to such drives unless you install a third-party driver or muck about in the Terminal. Windows prefers to use NTFS (which stands for New Technology File System, though it has been around for nearly 20 years now).

FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC MAC OS

Finally, Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup utility won’t work with FAT32.

FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC MAC OS X

When formatting partitions, Windows 7’s Disk Management utility won’t let you create one that’s larger than 32GB, whereas Mac OS X Lion can create partitions as large as 2TB using its Disk Utility application. So if you work with bulky video clips, for example, adopting FAT32 may not be a good idea. FAT32 imposes a size limit of 4GB on single files. The chief drawbacks of FAT32 involve file and partition size limitations. Though this format has some limitations, it enjoys nearly universal support from active platforms, including Mac and Windows operating systems, and many gaming and Linux OSs. With a modern flash drive, it’s unlikely you’ll notice much difference either way, so it’s up to you whether you stick to the 4KB standard or pick a smaller allocation unit size.Looking to share an external hard drive between a Mac and PC? The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as FAT32.

Splitting up a file into more chunks gives the drive controller more work to do, and makes it more likely that the data will end up fragmented into lots of blocks scattered about your disk, making it slower to access. However, this can have a negative impact on performance, especially if you’re using a mechanical disk drive. If you plan to save lots of small files to your disk then reducing the allocation unit size might be a good idea. In practice though, most of the files on your USB drive will probably be many megabytes in size, so the impact of wasting a few kilobytes here and there is negligible. A file that’s only 1KB in size will still occupy 4KB of space, while a 5KB file will take up 8KB, and so on. Slicing up disk space in this way isn’t perfectly efficient. Simply put, this determines the size of the chunks in which storage is allocated for your files: if you choose 4096 bytes (the NTFS default), every file that’s saved to that disk will be allocated space in multiples of 4KB.

FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC HOW TO

How to format a USB drive: allocation unit sizeĪs well as choosing a disk format, Windows also invites you to specify an “Allocation unit size”. For historical reasons, Windows won’t offer FAT32 as an option if your disk is larger than 32GB, but you can format a disk of any size by opening a Command Prompt and typing format h: /fs:fat32 /q, where h: is the letter of your removable drive and the /q parameter specifies a quick format – assuming you don’t want to wait around for Windows to check each sector of the drive for errors. On a Mac, you can format any disk as FAT32 by simply choosing “MS-DOS (FAT)” from the dropdown menu in Disk Utility before you click Erase…. This is supported by all versions of Windows and OS X (as well as Linux), but it has the drawback of not supporting individual files larger than 4GB – which can be a pain if you work with large video files or databases. If you need compatibility with systems that are older than this, you’ll need to fall back to the ancient FAT32 format. In most cases we recommend you select Microsoft’s exFAT format: this will give you full read and write access in both Windows (Vista or later) and OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later). You can choose this from the drop-down menu in Windows’ Format dialogue, or in the Erase pane of Disk Utility. To use your USB disk on both Windows and OS X, therefore, you’ll need to use a different filesystem.

FORMAT FOR MAC AND WINDOWS EXTERNAL DRIVE ON PC DRIVERS

There are free drivers available, but again these are limited to read-only access. However, neither is suitable if you want to move files back and forth between Macs and PCs: OS X can read NTFS volumes, but it can’t write to them, while Windows in its default configuration can’t access HFS+ disks at all. These formats are sensible defaults because they support all the features of their respective operating systems, such as native compression and encryption. If you follow the instructions above then Windows will, by default, format your disk using Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, while a Mac might suggest the Mac OS Extended filesystem.

Format for mac and windows external drive on pc