Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar. 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. Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility ). 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. Connect the USB drive that you want to format to FAT32 to your Mac. First, plug your USB drive into your Mac. 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. The simplest way to format a USB on macOS is through the Disk Utility.

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. When you format your USB drive on a Mac computer, you should first consider which device you wish to connect the data storage device to and which operating systems are running on these devices.

I'd like to have at least one external, USB HDD formatted to work on both Mac & PC.

Format usb macos