

You may often encounter the FAT32 file system out in the wild because it’s still commonly used, so we’ll quickly break down the differences between the two. Like its older cousin, FAT32, ExFAT is universally compatible with all mainstream devices (so ExFAT will make your external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC). The best hard drive format for Mac and Windows is ExFAT. What is the Best Format for Mac and Windows How do I make my external hard drive compatible with Mac without losing data?.Can I use the same external hard drive for PC and Mac?.Is exFAT compatible with Mac and Windows?.How to Make External Hard Drive Compatible with Mac and PC without Formatting.How to Recover Data from Formatted Hard Drive.

Method 3: Format Your Drive on Windows With Command Prompt.Method 2: Format Your Drive on Windows with Disk Management.Method 1: Format Your Drive on Windows with File Explorer.How to Format External Hard Drive on Windows.Method 2: Format Your Drive on Mac with Terminal.Method 1: Format Your Drive on Mac With Disk Utility.How to Format External Hard Drive on Mac.What is the Best Format for Mac and Windows.Tuxera (who develop one of the commercial NTFS drivers for Mac OS X) have a list of free NTFS drivers that are developed from the same NTFS-3G source used by Linux to read NTFS drives. For a while I've been using but as far as I can tell it hasn't been updated since December 2008. I'd love for someone to tell me differently. There are a few third-party products that allow Mac OS X to read NTFS formatted drives but as far as I'm aware the free ones aren't as well maintained as the commercial ones. Mac OS X has had support for reading NTFS formatted disk for a few versions, but still doesn't have write support. The default GUID partitioning scheme won't be recognised by 32-bit Windows XP and earlier Windows operating systems and Mac OS X versions earlier than 10.4. FAT32 (called MS-DOS (FAT) by Disk Utility a filesystem originally released in 1977 and updated a few times since, lastly in 1996) really is the only cross platform filesystem that is going to work fully out of the box with Windows and Mac OS X.īe careful though, if you are using Disk Utility to format the drive, you should make sure to choose the Master Boot Record partitioning scheme (hit the "Options." button below the "Partition Layout" control on the Partition pane).
