- DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC HOW TO
- DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC MAC OS
- DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC DRIVERS
- DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC FULL
If your disk was initially formatted to NTFS on a PC (or HFS+ on a Mac), most likely you’ll suffer limitations, for example, the data on your drive can’t be read or written on one of your computers.įortunately, there is a file system (actually two, I’ll explain) that you can format your flash drive to be fully compatible with Mac and PC. If you have a USB drive, and you plan to use it on both a Mac and PC, things can get a bit tricky here. By default, Macs are with HFS+ (since 2017 there’s new Apple File System, APFS, optimized for flash storage), while PCs are with NTFS.
With a modern flash drive, it’s unlikely you’ll notice much difference either way, so it’s up to you whether you stick to the 4KB standard or pick a smaller allocation unit size.It’s no surprise that PCs and Macs do not work well with each other, due to differences between the two operating systems (Windows vs. Splitting up a file into more chunks gives the drive controller more work to do, and makes it more likely that the data will end up fragmented into lots of blocks scattered about your disk, making it slower to access.
However, this can have a negative impact on performance, especially if you’re using a mechanical disk drive. If you plan to save lots of small files to your disk then reducing the allocation unit size might be a good idea. In practice though, most of the files on your USB drive will probably be many megabytes in size, so the impact of wasting a few kilobytes here and there is negligible. A file that’s only 1KB in size will still occupy 4KB of space, while a 5KB file will take up 8KB, and so on.
Slicing up disk space in this way isn’t perfectly efficient. Simply put, this determines the size of the chunks in which storage is allocated for your files: if you choose 4096 bytes (the NTFS default), every file that’s saved to that disk will be allocated space in multiples of 4KB.
DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC HOW TO
How to format a USB drive: allocation unit sizeĪs well as choosing a disk format, Windows also invites you to specify an “Allocation unit size”. For historical reasons, Windows won’t offer FAT32 as an option if your disk is larger than 32GB, but you can format a disk of any size by opening a Command Prompt and typing format h: /fs:fat32 /q, where h: is the letter of your removable drive and the /q parameter specifies a quick format – assuming you don’t want to wait around for Windows to check each sector of the drive for errors. On a Mac, you can format any disk as FAT32 by simply choosing “MS-DOS (FAT)” from the dropdown menu in Disk Utility before you click Erase…. This is supported by all versions of Windows and OS X (as well as Linux), but it has the drawback of not supporting individual files larger than 4GB – which can be a pain if you work with large video files or databases. If you need compatibility with systems that are older than this, you’ll need to fall back to the ancient FAT32 format.
DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC FULL
In most cases we recommend you select Microsoft’s exFAT format: this will give you full read and write access in both Windows (Vista or later) and OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later). You can choose this from the drop-down menu in Windows’ Format dialogue, or in the Erase pane of Disk Utility. To use your USB disk on both Windows and OS X, therefore, you’ll need to use a different filesystem.
DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC DRIVERS
There are free drivers available, but again these are limited to read-only access. However, neither is suitable if you want to move files back and forth between Macs and PCs: OS X can read NTFS volumes, but it can’t write to them, while Windows in its default configuration can’t access HFS+ disks at all. These formats are sensible defaults because they support all the features of their respective operating systems, such as native compression and encryption.
DISK FORMAT FOR MAC AND PC MAC OS
If you follow the instructions above then Windows will, by default, format your disk using Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, while a Mac might suggest the Mac OS Extended filesystem.
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