- #FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC ON LINUX HOW TO#
- #FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC ON LINUX WINDOWS 10#
- #FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC ON LINUX PC#
#FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC ON LINUX PC#
Open the Disk Management tool by right-clicking This PC -> Manage -> Disk Management.
#FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC ON LINUX WINDOWS 10#
Connect your external hard drive to your Windows 10 PC. Format external hard drive with Windows built-in tool
#FORMAT EXTERNAL DRIVE FOR MAC ON LINUX HOW TO#
Well then, how to format an external hard drive to exFAT with Windows PC? Here we take an example of formatting external hard drive to exFAT in a Windows 10 PC. Thus, you’d better use the Windows machine to format your external hard drive. However, if you want to use the Mac to format your external hard drive to exFAT, you’ll face the problem that the external hard drive may not be compatible with the Windows PC. You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. How to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC? Thus, many users would like to use exFAT instead of FAT32 to make an external hard drive for mac and windows interchangeable. However, FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.īoth FAT32 and exFAT can be used on Windows PC and Mac. Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems. I use APFS for my boot drives, but given the amount of cross platform work I do, I’m more hesitant to format external storage AFPS.Need to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows Last, this tip though is heavily focused on cross-platform workflows and especially about the perils of ExFat. Mostly about how it handles blocks and specifically “extents”. The person who wrote that is one of the developers of Softraid. Generally, APFS is less efficient on spinning disks – I’ll reference an older blog post here for some of the technicals. And I don’t know if it’s still the case, but OSX couldn’t share APFS over AFS, but rather had to fall back to SMB or NFS. And I believe, prior to Big Sur, it had difficulties with Time Machine Drives. Fusion drives (at the last time I checked) can’t do it. Here are a couple of headaches – older systems, especially prior to Sierra are out. For Apple-centric SSD-based devices? Fantastic. M.2 Drives: Which Is Best for Your IT Workflow?įirst, I love APFS – but I tend to resist one size fits all.
That way, you stop thinking about what any drive is formatted and just get your work done. It can read/write the Mac format on a Windows system.