- External hard drive formatted for mac use on windows mac os#
- External hard drive formatted for mac use on windows archive#
- External hard drive formatted for mac use on windows windows#
External hard drive formatted for mac use on windows mac os#
There are actually a few subcategories in the Mac OS Extended family, which can be selected when formatting a drive in Mac’s Disk Utility.
External hard drive formatted for mac use on windows windows#
It’s an ideal format for photographers who need only to access their images and video files on a computer running the Mac operating system because HFS+ isn’t readable by Windows machines. Built to replace the original Hierarchical File System (HFS) more than 20 years ago, HFS+ is better known by a different name: Mac OS Extended. So, if you need more workflow versatility than this one-way transfer allows, consider another format such as APFS for Mac-first applications or exFAT for true interchangeability. If you want to be able to transfer files to a Mac, NTFS can accomplish that too-but with one caveat: files can’t be written or deleted when the drive is connected to a Mac. NTFS has long been the default Windows file format, which makes it an incredibly useful choice if your primary machine runs any Windows operating system. Unless your new hard drive was factory formatted for use with a Mac, it’s likely formatted NTFS. Here’s help to choose the right hard drive format whether you use a Windows PC, a Mac or both.
External hard drive formatted for mac use on windows archive#
Whether you’ll be using it to back up photos for travel, shuttle video files from machine to machine or archive files for the long term, the format you choose for the disk makes a big difference. Hopefully you now know which options above to pick from the list of best formats for external hard drives, which can save your bacon when making the wrong choice can lead to a situation where an external disk just won’t plug-and-play.There are several factors to consider when it comes time to format an external hard drive. Picking the wrong one can turn into a real pain when you have to backup and reformat an entire drive because it won’t work for its intended purpose. Picking a format for your external drive can be pretty confusing. In fact, most devices have an internal SD card formatting routine, so we recommend you simply let the intended device format the card. exFAT is still a good choice if your DSLR (for example) supports it, but follow the manufacturer’s recommendation.
With SD cards, your choice should be entirely driven by which formats the devices you use support. However, that’s set to change in the future. Of course, if you’re also going to use your thumb drive on your current Linux machine, exFAT won’t work at the time of writing. Especially if you also want to use your thumb drive with iPads, iPhones and Macs.įAT32 is a fallback if you want to use your thumb drive with older devices that don’t support exFAT. Which means you may want to use large files, such as HD video files, on your thumb drive. With the fairly cheap yet large flash drives we have today, there’s some overlap in the use cases for thumb drives and external hard drives. SD cards and USB thumb drives are still an important part of our digital lives, so which formats should you pick? The choice for the best format for external hard drives involves different considerations compared to other forms of external storage. Unfortunately, Linux does not yet have support for exFAT, but that is reportedly set to change with the release of Kernel 5.4. The most compatible option is FAT32, but as we mentioned above it has a hard 4GB limit on file sizes. However, Linux supports NTFS, which makes for a decent go-between if you have both Windows and Linux machines. Linux has its own proprietary EXT formats and if you are only going to use your external drive with a Linux machine, you can safely go ahead and pick that format. Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Linux are becoming more popular by the day, but are still relatively niche overall.
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