Free NTFS drivers include FUSE for macOS, NTFS-3G, Mounty and SL-NTFS. There are free and paid NTFS drivers for Mac available. If you came cross the problem because you are using a Microsoft NTFS drive, a third-party NTFS mounter can make your NTFS drives compatible with macOS without formatting. How to enable NTFS write support on Mac with a third-party NTFS driver? The drive will work seamlessly with Macs and PCs without any third-party software. Step 7: Choose GUID Partition Map as Scheme.Īfter the formatting process is completed, click on “Done” and you will have a drive with exFAT file system. Step 4: Choose Erase at the top tool bar. Step 3: Select the external drive at the left sidebar. Step 2: Go to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. Step 1: Connect the external drive to the Mac. The instructions below are conducted on a Mac running macOS Mojave. You can format the external drive to exFAT both on a PC or a Mac. If you do not care about data, however, go ahead to format it to exFAT. Therefore, back all files up before formatting. Your pen drives, SD cards or external hard drives will turn blank and all your files will be gone after formatting. That’s because, formatting a disk will write a new file system on your disk and prepare your disk for new data to write on. Note: Before you proceed with the instructions, remember to back up your data first if you have important files on the drive.

It is a great choice for sharing an external drive between Mac and PC. It offers better compatibility than NTFS file system and eliminates the 4GB file size limit of FAT32 file system. How to format an external drive to exFAT?ĮxFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) file system is the optimization of FAT32 file system. Use a third-party NTFS for Mac driver to enable NTFS write support for macOS.I will introduce two methods to solve the incompatibility problem.

Windows don’t support Apple’s HFS, HFS+ and latest APFS file system at all, while macOS only has read support to Windows NTFS file system.įor cross-platform users who need to share files between PCs and Macs using a portable drive, it is extremely inconvenient with a drive not fully supported by both operating systems. Windows and macOS use completely different logics to store and manage files, so some file systems might work well in Windows platform but not necessarily in macOS platform and vice versa. Does anybody know why and how to make the hard drive compatible with Mac and PC?” This is the first time that I encountered such a problem. I always use an external drive to share files between my MacBook Air and Windows computer in my office.

I was so happy to try it on my MacBook Air, only to find I could not save any files to it. “I got a WD My Passport hard drive from my friend as my birthday present.

How to reformat external drive on a pc