But for external hard drives the best format for your Mac formatted drives is HFS+. And the default Mac format for external disks on Big Sur is APFS. Once OS X Fuse and NTFS-3G are installed, your Mac should be able to read and write to NTFS disks just fine. Best Format For External Hard Drive Mac Big Sur. Formatting in HFS (Mac OS Extended) or FAT32 or NTFS-3G can be done with the Mac OS X Disk Utility. If you want to format a drive so that you can copy files between a Mac and a PC youll want to follow the tutorial above, but choose ExFAT from the.
FORMAT EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR MACBOOK AIR AND PC HOW TO
Follow the instructions to download NTFS-3G for Mac OS X, whose development seems stopped right now but still works in Yosemite. Any external hard drive will work with PCs or Macs, as long as the connectors are there (Firewire, USB, etc.) It doesnt matter how the drive is formatted out of the box, since you can re-format any way you like. How to format an drive to use with a Mac & PC.
Follow the directions on the OS X Fuse website to download and configure the software. NativeNTFS isn't for rookies: It's a bash script that needs to run from the Terminal command line and requires you to have root (administrator) access to your computer.Īn easier way to go is to download OS X Fuse, a third-party software tool that extends the Mac's file system capabilities. If you're a DIYer and you'd like to go the free route, you'll find a Sourceforge project called NativeNTFS-OSX that gets the job done. It includes several additional utilities for people who need to tinker or repair, to enable you to format drives with NTFS, check NTFS partition integrity, fix errors, and more. Paragon Software's NTFS for Mac 12 is another excellent choice. NTFS for Mac costs $31, and you can download a demo first to see how it does. It uses smart caching to keep data transfer as fast as possible and works with every OS X version since 10.4 (Tiger). Tuxera's NTFS for Mac is one of the best ways to do it.
Whatever the case, the good news is that it's not a show-stopper: There are a few utilities out there that will enable Macs to write to mounted NTFS volumes. Maybe the drive you're using has to be used with a PC occasionally. Obviously that solution doesn't work for everyone.