But while HFS+ is the best way to format drives for use on Macs, Windows does not support it. Mac OS X’s native file system is HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended), and it’s the only one that works with Time Machine. In fact, there are four ways you can format an external or USB flash drive to achieve varying degrees of compatibility between Macs and PCs. Since Mac OS X and Windows use totally different file systems, the way a drive is formatted can determine what type of computer it will work with. Need to access or transfer files between Mac and PC? As simple as this task sounds, it’s not very straightforward for inexperienced users. Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly. This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Robin.If you have an external hard drive or USB flash drive that you’d like to use on both Macs and Windows PCs, choosing the right file system to format the drive can be confusing. Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar.įrom the Scheme menu, select Master Boot Record.Ĭlick Erase and follow prompts to confirm. Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility). While first ensuring you have a copy of any data on a drive you want to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, follow these steps:
Instead, pick ExFAT, its replacement (and still quite old), best used on drives of 32GB or larger capacity. Designed for an earlier time, it can’t handle files larger than 4GB. If you’re both Mac users, swell with Mac and Windows in the mix, you might be tempted to pick FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.īut FAT32 is distinctly out of date. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to someone else. For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory.
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