How to format external hard drive Mac: Buying an external hard drive is one of the best options for adding the storage space to the Mac computer system. While you have bought this drive, you will find the drive already formatted for your Mac or Windows system. However, you have to reformat the drive to make it functional with your Mac computer. The file systems used for different OS, differ from each other for processing data.
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Best External Drive Format For Mac Os And Windows 7
After unpacking the new drive you have to set its connection with Mac PC. One of the significant steps for you is to deal with the Disk Utility option, present under Utilities in the Application menu. There are mounted disk images and connected drives in the sidebar. You can choose one of these drives, identify the name and space available there.
Types of File system in Mac
Oct 16, 2019 The Best Format for External Hard Drives If you want to format your external hard drive to work with Mac and Windows computers, you should use exFAT. With exFAT, you can store files of any size, and use it with any computer made in the last 20 years. Mar 15, 2018 Rather than use a Mac-formatted drive, you should get the important files off of it and use exFAT-formatted drives for moving data between Macs and PCs. To format the drive in Windows, right-click it in the File Explorer window and select “Format.”. Choose the “exFAT” file system in.
Before starting the formatting hard drive in Mac, you have to connect your Mac system to External Hard Drive. You may also set a direct connection to your computer.
Thus, we have presented you with a number of options to format external hard drive in Mac computer.
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Before format external hard drive in Mac, you should know about the file systems offered by Disk Utility.
1. “HFS+” File system
Hierarchical File System+ or Mac OS Extended is one of the file systems, useful to the Mac storage. This type of file system is the right choice to be usable for SSDs and mechanical drives. When your Mac system was bought a number of years ago, you may find macOS Extended as the best option, helping you to use the external drive.
HFS+ formatted external drives play smoothly with both new and old Apple’s OS. For accessing Extended file system content on your Windows computer, you have to use another software- Paragon HFS+
2. Apple File System
It is the latest file system, introduced by Apple in 2017. It has replaced the Mac Extended file system. In most of the modern Macs, you can find come with APFS file system.
In case of the flash storage and SSDs, you may choose Apple File System. However, it is also usable with conventional mechanical HDD. One of the best refinements done to the previous file system of Apple is the speed. Due to the way in which this file system arranges the data, you can find the fastest copy-paste process. Apple has also dealt with better metadata management and encryption. The macOS highly use metadata for file storage.
3. “exFAT” File system
Microsoft has designed it for providing FAT32 compatibility. This exFAT is the best format for those drives, which are sharable between Mac and Windows computers. Moreover, Windows and macOS have the capability of reading and writing exFAT volumes. That is why you can use exFAT for external drives and flash storage drives.
The primary issue with this exFAT file system is that it has a fragmentation problem. Still, you may rely on your own preference for choosing this file system.
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Disk Utility User Guide
Disk Utility on Mac supports several file system formats:
Apple File System (APFS)
Apple File System (APFS), the default file system for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later, features strong encryption, space sharing, snapshots, fast directory sizing, and improved file system fundamentals. 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. macOS 10.13 or later supports APFS for both bootable and data volumes.
APFS allocates disk space within a container on demand. The disk’s free space is shared and can be allocated to any of the individual volumes in the container as needed. If desired, you can specify reserve and quota sizes for each volume. Each volume uses only part of the overall container, so the available space is the total size of the container, minus the size of all the volumes in the container.
Choose one of the following APFS formats for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later.
You can easily add or delete volumes in APFS containers. Each volume within an APFS container can have its own APFS format—APFS, APFS (Encrypted), APFS (Case-sensitive), or APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted).
Mac OS Extended
Choose one of the following Mac OS Extended file system formats for compatibility with Mac computers using macOS 10.12 or earlier.
Format External Drive On MacWindows-compatible formats
Choose one of the following Windows-compatible file system formats if you are formatting a disk to use with Windows.
Mac Os Format External Drive
Format Mac Drive In Windows
See alsoPartition schemes available in Disk Utility on MacAbout Disk Utility on Mac
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