- FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WINDOWS 10 VS MAC HOW TO
- FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WINDOWS 10 VS MAC FOR MAC
FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WINDOWS 10 VS MAC FOR MAC
Hard drives for Windows PC are formatted with NTFS by default, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. You have to ask yourself, do I need to use those characters, or do I need individual file sizes to be higher than 4GB each. Formatting an External Hard Disk Drive From a Mac: To put in simple words, if you want to share the external hard drive between Macintosh and Windows PC, you need to format an external hard drive for the respective system. The following reserved characters are forbidden on NTFS files/names: (greater than) Only problem with NTFS is that it does not allow the following characters, which can be a problem on Linux and OSX, but obviously not on Windows: Here, you need to replace the 'D' with your drive letter. Step 2 Next, you need to type the command - 'format /FS:FAT32 D:' and press 'Enter'. It also has very limited permission and ACL support for those who need to isolate different users from certain files. Step 1 To start the process, press the 'Windows + X' keys at the same time to open a menu and click the 'Windows PowerShell (Admin)' option. ExFAT has no file system-level encryption or compression support, and, like FAT32 before it, there is no journaling built into the exFAT file system. The problem with ExFat (even though others suggested it, is the 4GB file size limit. Insert your NTFS drive or USB stick and click to highlight the disk name in the white box on the left-hand side of the window.
FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE WINDOWS 10 VS MAC HOW TO
NTFS is the most reliable of the three file systems because it is journaled. However, Mac OS has poor NTFS write support. You'd probably have to purchase the Paragon NTFS driver. See How-To Geek: How to Write to NTFS Drives on a Mac. This means read/write speeds of about 120MB/s.
It’s a standard hard disk drive with an RPM of just 5,400. For speeds, the real problem is the technology of the drive, though. If you add phones to the mix, you'll have to use FAT32 or exFAT. As long as you don't hit the file size limit of FAT32, they're pretty much the same. However, I would not use a drive formatted with FAT32 or exFAT for anything that isn't transient or unimportant. I recently had problems with both file systems on camera SD cards that required reformatting to fix. I don't even want to think about having the same issues with a 2TB hard drive. For Mac users, you’ll need to reformat it, and there’s no USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt, just USB 2.0/3.0. While you can fix minor problems on all three file systems with fsck, you will have to use MS Windows to fix anything major. Consider splitting the drive into two partitions. A large NTFS partition for data that is more stable, as well as read/write on Windows and Linux. A small exFAT partition to copy files from Mac OS.įAT32. Read/write on all three systems. Not journaled. File size < 4G.ĮxFAT. Read/write on all three systems. Not journaled.