Formatting external drives for mac how to#
Formatting external drives for mac for mac#
Formatting external drives for mac Pc#

Whether you are trying to backup Mac to an external hard drive, wipe out any personal information and sell the computer, or even use a new operating system, you need to format the hard drive on your Mac or PC. As a rule, these devices are either external solid-state drives or multi-drive RAID arrays that cost a lot of money. Some people are asking for a way to format a hard drive for Mac. Most of today's Apple-friendly devices are aimed at photographers and video editors looking for ways to store footage with quick access to it. Follow this tutorial to make your external hard drive, USB, etc., storage devices fully compatible with Mac now.

Formatting external drives for mac how to#

Then your Mac can reformat the drive to APFS or HFS+ Mac OS Extended (Journaled). This article shows you how to format an external hard drive via different methods, and you can follow these methods to format external hard drive for PC, Mac or Linux. This page shares the idea of selecting the best format for an external hard drive on Mac and presents you with a step-by-step guide to formatting an external hard drive in Mac. Just make sure that any files on the external hard drive or SSD drive are copied off first. Here is some info I put together: NTFS Windows (XP+): read/write Mac: read Note: There is an option to activate writing to NTFS partitions in Mac, but itвЂ™s not stable and can corrupt files. macOS 10.13 or later supports APFS for both bootable and data volumes. Insert the flash drive or hard drive you want to format for Windows compatibility. Click the Erase button and the drive will start formatting. Select the format Mac OS Extended (HFS+), MS-DOS (FAT32), or exFAT then name the drive.

Formatting external drives for mac Pc#

Learn how to format a hard drive on a PC or Mac. While APFS is optimized for the Flash/SSD storage used in recent Mac computers, it can also be used with older systems with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and external, direct-attached storage. Select your external hard drive or USB flash drive from the list on the left. In addition, there is a feasible way to make external drive compatible with Mac and PC without formatting. Formatting external drives (flash drives and external HD) for use in Mac and Windows environment can be quite confusing. Formatting your hard drive is recommended if you're selling your computer or setting up an external drive.

Formatting external drives for mac for mac#

The process of choosing the best external hard drive for Mac is not too different from choosing an external hard drive for a Windows device, except for one nuance вЂ“ new models of Mac laptops are designed with Thunderbolt 3 ports, which significantly narrows the choice of appropriate external hard drives. All external hard drives can be reformatted by your Mac. This post elaborates on how to format external drive for Mac and PC.