To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.Ĭurrently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC Actually, most external hard disks could be compatible with Mac and PC as long as you format them correctly. Well, is there an external hard drive that could be shared between Mac and Windows PC? Of course, there is. The default file system in Windows is NTFS, while Mac OS users HFS.Īs we know, external hard drives are widely used to backup data or interchange files among different computers. Want to use external hard drive under both Windows PC and Mac? In this case, you should consider the hurdle that these operating systems support different filesystems.
Method 3: Format external hard drive for Mac and PC. If you have files larger than 4 GB, but still want pretty good support across devices, choose exFAT. If you want to share your files with the most devices and none of the files are larger than 4 GB, choose FAT32. How do you know your Mac, Xbox, and Windows PC can read your files? Read on to find your perfect USB drive solution.
