WHICH FORMAT OF DRIVE IS BEST FOR USE OF BOTH WINDOWS AND MAC DRIVER
What's even better, if your drive is a Seagate you can download this version for free:Īlternately, if you are running a Windows machine and need to read and write Mac HFS+ disks, Paragon also make a driver utility for Windows too: There are also hybrid drives, known as SSHDs, which offer the best of both worlds, with the speeds of SSDs and the capacities of HDDs in a single drive, and which are worth considering if you don. Tuxera NTFS uses the same external USB drives for both Mac and Windows. This costs about $20, but is worth every penny if you do any kind of cross-platform work. Connect a drive or storage media to an NTFS partition and use it as you wish. But if it is formatted as NTFS, it will not be fully supported in the Mac operating system. If the USB drive is formatted as an HFS+ file system, Windows computer will not support it. If you want to write to NTFS on a Mac, the best solution is: I have a USB drive and want to use it on both Mac and PC. Macs can read NTFS, but normally can't write to it. The most common Windows drive format is the NTFS system, which modern Windows machines use by default, and which is the format most hard drives come with as standard. Is this still correct?įAT32 is supported on both Windows and MacOS but is not recommended(especially for audio files) because of its file size limits. If you wish to transfer big files from Windows to Mac, you’ll still have an alternative, i.e. The FAT32 format can be read and written on both OS and hence it is the most versatile format for use.
If you use Windows, chances are good that you won’t need to reformat your external hard drive. You can also use the FAT32 format on Mac for USB drives if you wish to use it on both Mac and Windows. Before you begin, you want first to determine how much space you. My previous understanding was that only FAT32 is supported between platforms. Answer (1 of 5): Although it’s true that most drives come preformatted for Windows out of the box. The best way to prep an external hard disk for use on both Windows and macOS is to perform the partitioning from within Windows 10. Especially so I can save iConnectivity drivers, updates etc. I'd like to have at least one external, USB HDD formatted to work on both Mac & PC.