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Can Mac and PC use the same external hard drive?
Want to use one external drive for both your Windows PC and your Mac machine? Windows uses NTFS while Mac OS uses HFS, and they’re incompatible with each other. However, you can format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac by using the exFAT filesystem.
What file format can be read by both Mac and PC?
ExFAT
For a hard drive to be able to be read and written to in both a PC and Mac computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format.
Will a hard drive formatted for Mac work on PC?
A hard drive formatted for use in a Mac has either an HFS or HFS+ file system. For this reason, a Mac-formatted hard drive is not directly compatible, nor readable by a Windows computer. The HFS and HFS+ file systems are not readable by Windows.
Can Mac read Windows external hard drive?
Macs can easily read PC-formatted hard disk drives. Your old external Windows PC drive will work great on the Mac. Apple has built OS X Yosemite and some previous OS X releases with the ability to read from those disks just fine.
What format does Mac use for external hard drive?
Apple File System (APFS) While APFS is optimized for the Flash/SSD storage used in recent Mac computers, it can also be used with older systems with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and external, direct-attached storage. macOS 10.13 or later supports APFS for both bootable and data volumes.
How do I make my Mac read and write to my external hard drive?
Here’s how to fix it.
- Select the drive in the Finder.
- Press Command-I to display the Get Info window.
- At the bottom of the window, click the arrow next to Sharing & Permissions to display permissions.
- Click on the Privilege menu next to your username and choose Read & Write.
- Close the Get Info window.
Can a Mac read a Windows hard drive?
Can you reformat an external hard drive from Mac to Windows without losing data?
You can now use the NTFS-HFS converter to switch disks to one format and vice versa without losing any data. The converter works not only for external drives but also for internal drives.