I have a PC at work and a MAC at home, and I would like to be able to use it on both computer. In reading the manual it shows that you can format the drive to either MAC or PC, but doesn’t show a set up to use it on both system. This is a file system limitation that affects both Mac's and PC's, and the only workaround is to format the drive to exFAT. For more information about what these limitations are please see Answer ID 1287: File and partition size limitations using the FAT32 file system (Windows and Mac).

If you have both Windows and Mac computers in your office, it's important to understand their different storage requirements before buying an external hard drive. Both operating systems use different formats for reading and writing to a hard drive. The only hard drive format that can be reliably used by both is called FAT32, or MS-DOS FAT as it's called on Mac computers. Even if your external hard drive doesn't come pre-formatted in FAT32, you can format it yourself using either a Mac or Windows PC. Other Formats External hard drives formatted specifically for Windows usually use NTFS.

Mac OS X can read NTFS drives but can't write to them. Unlike FAT32, NTFS supports Windows file permissions and is more stable. External hard drives designed specifically for Mac computers are usually formatted in HFS+. There are tools available online that allow you to write to NTFS from Mac OS X and tools that allow you to write to HFS+ from a Windows computer, but these tools can be difficult to manage and require some technical expertise.

Microsoft's successor to FAT32, exFAT, is compatible with recent versions of Windows and Mac OS and removes the 4GB limitation, but brings its own set of trade-offs (see Resources). Formatting From a Mac If you want to format a blank external drive from a Mac computer, launch the Disk Utility, located in the Applications Utility folder. After you select the drive, click the 'Erase' button at the top of the window, and then select 'MS-DOS (FAT)' from the Format menu.

If you want to only format a portion of the hard drive, click the 'Partition' button and then use the controls to select a partition size and which format you prefer. If you select a Mac OS format for the partition, it won't be readable from a WIndows PC. Formatting From a PC To format a blank drive from a PC, you can use the Windows 8 Disk Management Utility. Gimp mac looking for data files. To open this utility, right-click the bottom-left corner of the desktop and select 'Disk Management' from the menu.

After you locate the drive in the list on the left, right-click its name, select 'Format' and then select 'FAT32' from the File System menu. To format only a part of the drive, create a new partition on the drive, right-click the drive name and select 'New Simple Volume.' The New Simple Volume Wizard opens to guide you through the process. Any partition you make that is not in FAT32 is visible from a Mac computer, but the Mac can't write to it.

Posted by Katrina to on January 30th, 2018 The file system compatibility is always a big issue between Mac and Windows. It's well known that by default, Windows uses NTFS, and Mac OS uses HFS, these file systems are not compatible with each other. Often switch between Mac and PC? Want to share one external hard drive between Mac and Windows?

There are still ways to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC. Three ways to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC FAT32, exFAT and NTFS are three file systems for external drive in Windows. Based on these three file systems, we have three methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC.

Method 1: Format external hard drive as FAT32 (not recommend) As the oldest file system among these three file systems, FAT32 is compatible with a majority of recent and recently obsolete operating systems, including Mac and Windows. However, FAT32 can only support files up to 4 GB in size and A FAT32 partition must also be less than 8 TB.