Format an External Hard Drive to use on MAC and PC

[Chris Tompkins]

If you format the drive FAT32 or eXFat, both WIN and MAC can read it just fine.

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta LLC

[Joseph W. bourke]

Frank –

Here’s a good article on the process:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/250431/how_to_share_an_external_drive_between_a_mac_and_a_pc.html

I’ve also read that the Seagate GoFlex drives are Mac and PC compatible out of the box, although I have not tried them. If you’re doing the bulk of your editing on the Mac, as you say, you may want to look at a couple of utilities which allow the PC to access the Mac file structure:

https://www.thedailybuggle.com/read-mac-drive-windows/

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Frank Giardina]

Thanks Chris… I’m gonna give exFAT a shot.

Frank Giardina
17 Video Production

[Frank Giardina]

Thanks Joe!! You guys are the best!!

Frank Giardina
17 Video Production

[Ron Pestes]

According to the article I just read exFat only works with flash drives. What do you do with regular external hard drives unless you buy Macdrive?

ronpesteshdvideo.com
Apple Certified Master Pro FCS 2
Sony EX-3
MacBook Pro
Dell M6600
Adobe CS6 Production Premium

[Chris Borjis]

NTFS works best for me, but requires some utility installation
or a paid app to make the mac able to write to the volume.

FAT32 won’t allow files over 4gb in size.

[Frank Giardina]

Chris… would that be individual files of 4gb? My projects contain clips totaling over 100gb, with some individual clips as large as 1.4gb.

YIKES! Maybe I should just get a MAC Laptop and eat MAC and Cheese for a while.

Frank Giardina
17 Video Production

[Tero Ahlfors]

Just use exFat. It allows bigger files and works with Windows and Mac. Just keep in mind that if you format the disk in Windows the cluster size can’t be over 1024.

[Chris Borjis]

[Frank Giardina] “would that be individual files of 4gb”

yes, fat32 won’t allow copying 4gb individual files or larger.

I have paragon NTFS Mac installed on all 4 of my systems here so
I can copy back to client NTFS formatted volumes if necessary.

[Frank Giardina]

I figured I’d give this a try? If it doesn’t work, the drive will still be useful. I ordered a Seagate 2 TB USB 3.0 FreeAgent GoFlex Desk External Drive. The Paragon driver is a utility that is offered with the GoFlex family of external drives and enables MacOS to mount NTFS volumes (partitions), read from them, and write to them. In short, it makes the GoFlex drive usable on a Windows PC and on a Mac without any reformatting or data erasure or instability.

Frank Giardina
17 Video Production