format my seagate external hard drive for both mac and windows

#Format my seagate external hard drive for both mac and windows driver
#Format my seagate external hard drive for both mac and windows windows

Picking a format for your external drive can be pretty confusing. In fact, most devices have an internal SD card formatting routine, so we recommend you simply let the intended device format the card. exFAT is still a good choice if your DSLR (for example) supports it, but follow the manufacturer’s recommendation. With SD cards, your choice should be entirely driven by which formats the devices you use support. However, that’s set to change in the future. Of course, if you’re also going to use your thumb drive on your current Linux machine, exFAT won’t work at the time of writing. Especially if you also want to use your thumb drive with iPads, iPhones and Macs.įAT32 is a fallback if you want to use your thumb drive with older devices that don’t support exFAT. Which means you may want to use large files, such as HD video files, on your thumb drive. With the fairly cheap yet large flash drives we have today, there’s some overlap in the use cases for thumb drives and external hard drives. SD cards and USB thumb drives are still an important part of our digital lives, so which formats should you pick? The choice for the best format for external hard drives involves different considerations compared to other forms of external storage. Unfortunately, Linux does not yet have support for exFAT, but that is reportedly set to change with the release of Kernel 5.4. The most compatible option is FAT32, but as we mentioned above it has a hard 4GB limit on file sizes.

#Format my seagate external hard drive for both mac and windows windows

However, Linux supports NTFS, which makes for a decent go-between if you have both Windows and Linux machines. Linux has its own proprietary EXT formats and if you are only going to use your external drive with a Linux machine, you can safely go ahead and pick that format.

If you don't want to spend any money and don't have a Seagate drive, an alternative is to format your drive in the exFAT format, which is a Microsoft file system optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards, and is supported on both MacOS and Windows.Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Linux are becoming more popular by the day, but are still relatively niche overall.

#Format my seagate external hard drive for both mac and windows driver

What's even better, if your drive is a Seagate you can download this version for free:Īlternately, if you are running a Windows machine and need to read and write Mac HFS+ disks, Paragon also make a driver utility for Windows too: This costs about $20, but is worth every penny if you do any kind of cross-platform work. If you want to write to NTFS on a Mac, the best solution is: Macs can read NTFS, but normally can't write to it. The most common Windows drive format is the NTFS system, which modern Windows machines use by default, and which is the format most hard drives come with as standard. Is this still correct?įAT32 is supported on both Windows and MacOS but is not recommended(especially for audio files) because of its file size limits. My previous understanding was that only FAT32 is supported between platforms. Especially so I can save iConnectivity drivers, updates etc. I'd like to have at least one external, USB HDD formatted to work on both Mac & PC.