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1. #USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE MAC AND PC HOW TO#
2. #USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE MAC AND PC FOR MAC#
3. #USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE MAC AND PC MAC OS X#

Usually, it is disabled by default and needs some messing around in the Mac terminal to enable it. The Mac OS has an experimental support for writing to NTFS drives. And the automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode can be a security risk for your Mac computer.

Free Third-Party DriversįUSE for macOS is a free and open-source NTFS driver that can enable write support. MiniTool Partition Wizard is one representative.

#USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE MAC AND PC FOR MAC#

Paragon NTFS for Mac is such a driver.īesides, you can also use the paid third-party file system converters to convert NTFS to FAT32 or exFAT which are compatible with both Mac and PC. They work well and they have better performance than the free solutions which will be mentioned in the following part. Some paid third-party NTFS drivers for Mac can be used to access NTFS drives on Mac. Three Options for Accessing NTFS Drives on Mac Paid Third-Party Drivers Nevertheless, a lot of users complained that exFAT is slow, and they highly suggest using FAT32 if you can avoid file size constraints. Of course, there is free partition manager that can help create a FAT32 volume up to 2TB, which also functions correctly.ĮxFAT: exFAT has very large file size and partition size limits, which means it's a good idea to format your external hard drive to exFAT. In addition, a FAT32 partition must be not more than 32GB if you create it in Windows Disk Management. If your external drive saves files larger than 4GB or you plan to save larger files to this drive, converting to FAT32 is not recommended. However, single files on a FAT32 drive can't be larger than 4GB. As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows.īoth FAT32 and exFAT have advantages and disadvantages.įAT32: FAT32 works with all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, game consoles, etc. Similarly, Windows OS will ask us to format the HFS+ formatted drive when we connecting such a disk, let along edit files saved on HFS+ formatted hard disks unless we resort to third party programs.īut luckily, there are file systems well supported by both Mac and Windows PC, and they are FAT32 (it might be called MS-DOS on Mac) and exFAT.

#USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE MAC AND PC MAC OS X#

However, when we connect a NTFS formatted disk to Mac, Mac OS X doesn't allow us to write files to the drive neither edit files, though it can read a NTFS drive. 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.

#USE EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE MAC AND PC HOW TO#