What is the best file system for USB or external hard drive on Mac?
Nov 09, 2016 How To Create A NTFS Partition In Your Hard Disk November 9, 2016 by Sathishkumar Varatharajan 1 Comment If you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8 or Windows 10 computer, and looking for a way to create a NTFS partition in your Hard Disk, you are in the right page. Oct 27, 2017 - How to Format or Partition an External Hard Drive for Mac. That's all because it's been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which.
Windows and Mac OS X use different file systems. Windows uses NTFS and Mac can't write files to volumes with NTFS format.
So, if you want to use a USB flash drive or an external hard drive with NTFS format on Mac, you should first reformat the devices to the Mac OS Extended file system. It is the best way to ensure full Mac compatibility of a new external hard drive or flash disk.
Usually, FAT32 which can be read and wrote on Mac is recommended for maximum compatibility. And if you need to transfer files larger than 4 GB between Macs and Windows computers, exFAT or MS-DOS (FAT) is better.
How to format USB flash drive or external hard drive for Mac
But how can you format USB flash drive or external hard drive for Mac? Don’t worry! This page will show you two ways to do this job:
Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using Mac disk utility Format USB or external hard drive for Mac on Windows PC using third-party USB format tool
Now, you can follow these two solutions to format any hard drive, flash drive, USB drive, SSD or any other external storage drive so as to make them work on your Mac now.
Method 1. Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using Mac Disk utility
Windows offers users built-in disk management tool to create, delete, resize, merge and format partitions. You can try the following steps to format USB or external hard drive for Mac with Disk Utility on Mac.
1. Connect the USB or external hard drive to your Mac computer.
2. Launch the Disk Utility by clicking 'Applications' > 'Utilities'.
3. Locate and click on your USB or external hard drive in Disk Utility and then click on 'Erase'.
4. Next to 'Format', click the contextual menu and select 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)'.
5. Reset the drive name and click 'Erase', confirm the operation on the next pop-up window.
Wait for the process to complete and then you'll get compatible HFS+ file system on your external hard drive or USB, which will make your device compatible and workable on your Mac.
Method 2. Format USB or external hard drive for Mac using third-party USB format tool on a Windows PC
If you need a simpler format tool to format USB or external hard drive to FAT32 to make them work on Mac, you can apply a third-party format tool to format them on Windows PC. EaseUS partition software is a popular disk partition management tool which is available for all hard disk related jobs such as format disk partition, extend system partition, settle low disk space problem.
Now you can try it to format USB or external hard drive on your Windows PC by following the steps below. If you stored important data on the USB or external hard drive, you can try this tool to convert NTFS to FAT32 without formatting.
Step 1: Launch EaseUS Partition Master, right-click the partition on your external hard drive/USB/SD card which you want to format and choose the 'Format' option.
Step 2: Assign a new partition label, file system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3), and cluster size to the selected partition, then click 'OK'.
Step 3: In the Warning window, click 'OK' to continue.
Step 4: Click the 'Execute Operation' button in the top-left corner to review the changes, then click 'Apply' to start formatting your external hard drive/USB/SD card.
After this, you can connect your external hard drive/USB to Mac computer and use it to save data by then.
If you've switched to the Mac, welcome aboard. Your old external Windows PC drive will work great on the Mac. Apple has built OS X Yosemite and some previous OS X releases with the ability to read from those disks just fine. If you're using such a drive and you'd like to write new data to them, you'll find you can't unless you add new software. Fortunately, you don't have to spend a dime.
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One option is to back up your old Windows external drive (using Time Machine or another method). Reformat the drive using Apple's Disk Utility software and the company's HFS+ file system instead. Then you can restore the backed up data to the drive.
Even if the backed up and restored files originally came from a PC, they'll be stored on the drive using a file system the Mac fully understands. That way the drive will be fully Mac-compatible without any need for you to modify the operating system of the Mac to get it to work properly.
Obviously that solution doesn't work for everyone. Maybe the drive you're using has to be used with a PC occasionally. Whatever the case, the good news is that it's not a show-stopper: There are a few utilities out there that will enable Macs to write to mounted NTFS volumes.
Tuxera's NTFS for Mac is one of the best ways to do it. It uses smart caching to keep data transfer as fast as possible and works with every OS X version since 10.4 (Tiger). NTFS for Mac costs $31, and you can download a demo first to see how it does.
Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac 12 is another excellent choice. It includes several additional utilities for people who need to tinker or repair, to enable you to format drives with NTFS, check NTFS partition integrity, fix errors, and more. NTFS for Mac costs $19.95.
If you're a DIYer and you'd like to go the free route, you'll find a Sourceforge project called NativeNTFS-OSX that gets the job done. NativeNTFS isn't for rookies: It's a bash script that needs to run from the Terminal command line and requires you to have root (administrator) access to your computer.
An easier way to go is to download OS X Fuse, a third-party software tool that extends the Mac's file system capabilities. Follow the directions on the OS X Fuse website to download and configure the software. Follow the instructions to download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X, whose development seems stopped right now but still works in Yosemite. Once OS X Fuse and NTFS-3G are installed, your Mac should be able to read and write to NTFS disks just fine.
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