I recently picked up an external hard drive for my Mac (one terabyte of memory to be exact), but I really needed to use it for both my Mac and my Windows laptop. So, you just bought an external hard drive and wanted to use it on your Mac. But somehow, macOS doesn't allow you to write data to the drive. That's all because it's been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. Apple Mac machines support a different file system. In this post, I'm going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac compatible file system i.e. Mac OS Extended (Journaled). ![]() Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you're all set. Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. You could use a recovery program like to retrieve them, but the odds of recovery vary. Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine -- a 2TB Seagate Expansion -- I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. I'll also show you how to do that below. First of all, if you've run the Tweak Tester it likely advised you to turn on 'selective ACKs;' unfortunately selective ACKs are not supported by OS X. Vista tcp tweaks. Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFS During the last several years, I've used several removable drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others. Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated to the latest macOS, 10.13 High Sierra (also see I encountered). When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this. What is NTFS? I'm not going to explain here; you can read more on. The problem is that on macOS, you can't work with files saved on an NTFS drive unless you use a paid app. How to Format an External Drive to Work with Mac (from NTFS to Mac OS Extended)? Note: The tutorial and screenshots below are based on macOS Sierra 10.12.5. They might be different if your Mac has a different version. Step 1: Open Disk Utility. The quickest way to do this is a simple Spotlight search (click the search icon on the upper right corner), or go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. After clicking 'Partition', you'll see this window. Located on the left is a big blue circle with the name of your external drive together with its volume size. What you need to do next is click the add '+' button to increase the number of partitions on your external disk. Then allocate the desired volume to each partition. You can do that by clicking the small white circle and dragging it around. After that, you can rename each partition and define a file system for it. Step 3: Confirm your operation. Quick Navigation: • • • • • • As we know, external hard drives are widely used to backup data or interchange files among different computers. Well, is there an external hard drive that could be shared between Mac and Windows PC? Of course, there is. Actually, most external hard disks could be compatible with Mac and PC as long as you format them correctly. Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC 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. Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. Windows vs mac for business. 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. 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. But luckily, there are well supported by both Mac and Windows PC, and they are FAT32 (it might be called MS-DOS on Mac) and exFAT. As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows. Further Reading Both FAT32 and exFAT have advantages and disadvantages. FAT32: FAT32 works with all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux, game consoles, etc.
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