If you can’t see your USB drive in Explorer, search for “Create and format hard disk partitions” to open Windows’ Disk Management console. From here you can see all connected drives – even ones that aren’t currently usable in Windows. If need be you can wipe your USB device and reformat it as required. How to format a USB drive on a Mac Step one To format a USB on a Mac, you can format your drive using Disk Utility.
I have a SanDisk Cruser drive that was formatted for a Mac and now I want to use it for a PC (and I don't have access to the Mac. How do I format a usb drive on a. Part 2: Formatting USB on a Windows PC Please note: I'm here t o use a Windows 10 based HP laptop to format my Lexar drive. If you are on an earlier operating system like Windows 7, XP, etc.
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You’ll find this tool in your Applications folder, within the Utilities subfolder – or simply search Spotlight to find it (press Cmd+Space, then type its name). Step two When Disk Utility opens you’ll see a list of drives in the left-hand pane, with the partitions on each one nested beneath each entry. To reformat your USB disk, click on its name in this pane, then switch to the Erase tab in the main interface (if it’s not already selected) and hit Erase to wipe the drive. How to format a USB drive: which format? If you follow the instructions above then Windows will, by default, format your disk using Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem, while a Mac might suggest the Mac OS Extended filesystem. These formats are sensible defaults because they support all the features of their respective operating systems, such as native compression and encryption.
However, neither is suitable if you want to move files back and forth between Macs and PCs: OS X can read NTFS volumes, but it can’t write to them, while Windows in its default configuration can’t access HFS+ disks at all. There are free drivers available, but again these are limited to read-only access. To use your USB disk on both Windows and OS X, therefore, you’ll need to use a different filesystem.
You can choose this from the drop-down menu in Windows' Format. Dialogue, or in the Erase pane of Disk Utility.
In most cases we recommend you select Microsoft’s exFAT format: this will give you full read and write access in both Windows (Vista or later) and OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later). If you need compatibility with systems that are older than this, you’ll need to fall back to the ancient FAT32 format. This is supported by all versions of Windows and OS X (as well as Linux), but it has the drawback of not supporting individual files larger than 4GB – which can be a pain if you work with large video files or databases. On a Mac, you can format any disk as FAT32 by simply choosing “MS-DOS (FAT)” from the dropdown menu in Disk Utility before you click Erase. For historical reasons, Windows won’t offer FAT32 as an option if your disk is larger than 32GB, but you can format a disk of any size by opening a Command Prompt and typing format h: /fs:fat32 /q, where h: is the letter of your removable drive and the /q parameter specifies a quick format – assuming you don’t want to wait around for Windows to check each sector of the drive for errors. How to format a USB drive: allocation unit size. As well as choosing a disk format, Windows also invites you to specify an “Allocation unit size”.
Simply put, this determines the size of the chunks in which storage is allocated for your files: if you choose 4096 bytes (the NTFS default), every file that’s saved to that disk will be allocated space in multiples of 4KB. Slicing up disk space in this way isn’t perfectly efficient. A file that’s only 1KB in size will still occupy 4KB of space, while a 5KB file will take up 8KB, and so on. In practice though, most of the files on your USB drive will probably be many megabytes in size, so the impact of wasting a few kilobytes here and there is negligible. If you plan to save lots of small files to your disk then reducing the allocation unit size might be a good idea. However, this can have a negative impact on performance, especially if you’re using a mechanical disk drive.
Splitting up a file into more chunks gives the drive controller more work to do, and makes it more likely that the data will end up fragmented into lots of blocks scattered about your disk, making it slower to access. With a modern flash drive, it’s unlikely you’ll notice much difference either way, so it’s up to you whether you stick to the 4KB standard or pick a smaller allocation unit size.
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You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X’s Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”. And you can only do this with exFAT as with FAT32 Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup won’t work. FAT32 or exFAT?
You can format your external hard drive in both – exFAT and FAT32. They both will work just fine. Mac and PC can read and write on both. However, each of these filesystems has their own pros and cons.
FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit, but exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB, that’s more than you will ever need. If you have to work with large video clips, games or any other kind of massive files, FAT32 may not be the best choice. Many still choose FAT32 over exFAT despite its slower performance, as it’s also compatible with Linux Os and is supported on many consoles. Once you have done with formatting, your external hard drive will be able to write and read files from both a PC and Mac.
The resulting FAT32 file system will be compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, and Windows including back to 95. This is one of the most widely recognized file system formats. FAT32 – a file system normally used on USB disks. exFAT – a newer file system optimized for flash devices and has improved performance overFAT32 Why I can’t use NTFS on Mac?
The default file system for Windows is NTFS (New Technology File System). Macs that run Snow Leopard or Lion can read data from drives that are formatted as NTFS. However, they can’t write. To make your Mac compatible writing on NTFS you have to get and install a third-party driver. So in the end, it’s possible to make your NTFS external hard drive compatible with Mac. But we advise to just format it to “FAT” file system as it’s less time consuming and easier.
Windows 7 can’t read nor write files to external drives that are formatted as HFS. To do so you also have to install third-party like. How to format an External Drive in Windows 1) Connect the drive to your Windows PC. 2) Open Disk Management.
3) Right click on unallocated or any other disk partition and select “ New Simple Volume” 4) Choose your desired size 5) Assign your external hard drive with any letter. 6) Choose exFAT as the file system. 7) Follow the instructions and at the end click “ Finish“ How to Format an External Drive in OS X 1) Connect your external hard drive to the Mac. 2) Open Disk Utility. You can do this quickly by pressing CMD and the spacebar at the same time. Then type in “Disk Utility”.
3) Select the drive you want to format. 4) Click the Partition tab. 6) Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition. 7) Click Options, Select Master Boot Record, and click OK. 8) Name the hard drive with a name of your choice. 9) Click the Format drop-down menu. 10) Select exFAT or MS-DOS FAT(FAT32).
11) At last press Apply, then click on Partition. WD My Book would be best for desktop, Seagate Backup Plus Slim would be one of the best portable hard drives. Both are all-around decent drives and will do fine for any backup, pictures included. As for cross-platform encryption, if you intend to use the same drive on both Mac and Windows, the best option would be using a cross-platform compatible encryption tool, like, while formatting the drive in exFAT to avoid compatibility issues.
This is because Windows won’t recognize Mac’s native encryption and vice versa. VeraCrypt is well-renowned, so it should function well without any problems, just be prepared to learn how to use the tool. Try testing this setup with just a couple files before you perform entire backups.