I am about to purchase my 1st Mac and I have a question on how to format an external hard drive so it can work with both a Mac and a PC. Is this possible? I will still have a PC in the house so it would be nice to be able to transfer files between the two. Can anyone help me with this?
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Format an external HD
- Thread starter mtm19
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If you're not using it as a boot drive, you won't need to format it to work with the Mac. Apple has made it so that their computers can easily connect with PC HDDs, without rendering them useless to PC owners.
Disk utility to make a FAT32 disk but your data is capped at 4GB per file and you may have your Mac save forked files if you're sharing the volume with Windows. (Has for me in the past).
To be honest I would use a virtualized solution like Dropbox or a home networked pooled storage system like Drobo (you should double check to make sure Drobo can work with the Mac-PC configuration, I believe it can).
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Nice! ... Much better than FAT
No. Windows by default formats drives as NTFS. NTFS is not writeable by Mac OS by default. He should use ExFAT or FAT32. I forget which versions of windows include support for ExFAT.
If you format it that way can you use the entire 1 TB drive with files from either OS or is it capped at all? I want to be able to use the entire drive with both a Mac and PC.
ExFAT is rather new and as such is fully compatible with current drives. It's the format of choice in my opinion. There's no cap or anything. I just looked it up, and it seems both Vista and 7 include support for it, so make sure that's alright.
Hmm... It seems there was in fact an update for XP to include support for the format. Assuming you keep up to date, then yes, it should work.
Make sure the mac doesn't try to format it with an Apple Partition Map, as that would be unreadable by a PC. Any other would be fine. To be safe, I'd format it on the PC though.
This is what I did:
1- Transfer all the data on your external drive to your PC.
2 - Connect your external drive to your Mac
3- Click on Finder
4- Click on Applications
5- Double click on Utilities
6- Double click on Disk Utility
7- Click on the external drive
8- Click on Erase
9- On Format choose MS-DOS (FAT)
10 Click on Erase
Once it is done, connect to your PC and transfer all of your data back to your external drive then connect to your Mac. That's all.
1- Transfer all the data on your external drive to your PC.
2 - Connect your external drive to your Mac
3- Click on Finder
4- Click on Applications
5- Double click on Utilities
6- Double click on Disk Utility
7- Click on the external drive
8- Click on Erase
9- On Format choose MS-DOS (FAT)
10 Click on Erase
Once it is done, connect to your PC and transfer all of your data back to your external drive then connect to your Mac. That's all.
I'd just change step #9 (above) to choose the exFAT option instead of 'regular' FAT due to no file size restriction.
ExFAT works great - even with XP once you've updated/patched it (my home desktop is XP) - Works 'out of the box' for win 7, vista.
HIGHLY recommend using the exFAT format - used NTFS and ntfs mounter for a while, but kept getting Creator codes and the like added to the files which caused major headaches.
ExFAT works great - even with XP once you've updated/patched it (my home desktop is XP) - Works 'out of the box' for win 7, vista.
HIGHLY recommend using the exFAT format - used NTFS and ntfs mounter for a while, but kept getting Creator codes and the like added to the files which caused major headaches.
How big are these files?
I agree with the earlier notion of Dropbox (or something else like it, say Windows Skydrive)
unless you want to share terra bytes of data -- either of those are great solutions.
drag, drop, done = on both computers.
I agree with the earlier notion of Dropbox (or something else like it, say Windows Skydrive)
unless you want to share terra bytes of data -- either of those are great solutions.
drag, drop, done = on both computers.
I use Dropbox but just the free 2GB version. I need to transfer almost 500 GB of files so that would take quite a while.
Here's a recap of disk formatting options:
FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
FAT32 (File Allocation Table)
- Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X.
[*]Maximum file size: 4GB. - Maximum volume size: 2TB
- Read/Write NTFS from native Windows.
- Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X
[*]To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X: Install NTFS-3G for Mac OS X (free) - Some have reported problems using Tuxera (approx $36).
- Some have had good results with Paragon (approx $20)
- Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard and Lion, but is not advisable, due to instability.
- AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS
- Maximum file size: 16 TB
- Maximum volume size: 256TB
- Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X
- Required for Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! backups of Mac internal hard drive.
[*]To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install MacDrive
[*]To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install HFSExplorer - Maximum file size: 8EiB
- Maximum volume size: 8EiB
- Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.
- Not all Windows versions support exFAT. See disadvantages.
- exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table)
- AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support exFAT
- Maximum file size: 16 EiB
- Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB
Who said you had to use Windows to format the drive? He can format the HD using the Mac with FAT32. However, seems like exFAT is a better file system.
It may be a good idea but, he should look into it deep before making a decision. There are a few disadvantages.