Looking to add storage, or for a smart way to back up your mac. Looking to share an external hard drive between a mac and pc. The best format for your external hard drive the hellotech blog. How to share an external drive between a mac and a pc. Use disk utility to erase format a hard disk, ssd, flash drive, or other storage. Heres how to format a drive if you are planning to use it with a mac. Yes, connecting an external hard drive or usb flash key to a mac will generally read and work fine as is because the mac can easily read other filesystem formats, including windows msdos, fat, fat32, exfat, and ntfs formats, but unless you intend on using the drive between a windows and mac machine, formatting it to be entirely mac compatible filesystem is highly recommended, and necessary for time machine and to make disks bootable. How to share an external hard drive between mac and windows. Hdd low level format tool free download and software. The best ways to format an external drive for windows and mac. How to format an external drive for mac compatibility. To format external hard drive on mac, all you have to do is plugin your hard drive and launch disk utility. Choosing the right format for your external hard drive b. Format an external hard drive or usb flash drive for mac os x.
Master boot record is appropriate for external drives used with a pc or boot camp. Heres what you need to know, along with our toprated applefriendly drives. That said, if you are using smaller file sizes fat32 can suffice. Click the erase button or tab, then complete these items. Plug in the external hard drive into mac and open the finder 2. Once disk utility is open youll see the list of available drives on the left. Most external hard drives hd are sold in a format called ntfs, which is designed to work with windows. Or perhaps you are setting up an external drive for backups. How to format a hard drive for both windows and mac.
While its convenient to purchase the hard drive that will work with your computer right out of the box, most external hard drives can also be reformatted so youre not limited to your initial choice. This small program will erase, lowlevel format and recertify a sata. Follow the path applicationsutilities and click disk utility. How to format external hard drives on a mac sweetwater. Select the file system you want to use and give the drive a name. How to format an external hard drive with pictures wikihow. Compare portable, usb and external hard drive models for office and home and shop online. If you want to write to ntfs formatted hard drives in mac os x, youre going to. Discover the world of external hard drives for mac. The best external hard drives for mac in 2020 pcmag. How to format an external hard drive the easy way in 2020. This is tip for windows on how to complete format and remove all partitions from a hard disk, including those which are normally protected and cant be. Choose either apfs or mac os extended journaled to format as a mac volume.
This menu item is in the upperleft side of the screen. How to format or partition an external hard drive for mac. Well show you everything you need to know about the. If you get an error message that states, erase process has failed. How to format an external hard drive on windows and mac. If you want to format your external hard drive to work with mac and windows computers, you should use exfat. Follow these instructions if you plan to share an external hard drive between pc and mac computers. Hdd low level format tool is a freeware utility for lowlevel hard disk drive formatting. If you buy a new external hard drive, you may notice that working between mac and pc is an often difficult but it doesnt need to be. Click go on the top tool bar, and select utilities. Heres how to format a drive using a mac including how to format a drive for. When done, quit disk utility to return to the utilities window. The best way to do it is with a drive formatted as fat32.