As we know, external hard drives are widely used to backup data or interchange files among different computers. Well, is there an external hard drive that could be shared between Mac and Windows PC? Of course, there is. Actually, most external hard disks could be compatible with Mac and PC as long as you format them correctly. To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC.
As long as we format the external hard drive to one of these 2 file systems, it can be shared between Mac and Windows.
Reformat External Hard Drive for Mac: Ultimate Guide in
If your external drive saves files larger than 4GB or you plan to save larger files to this drive, converting to FAT32 is not recommended. Of course, there is free partition manager that can help create a FAT32 volume up to 2TB, which also functions correctly. Nevertheless, a lot of users complained that exFAT is slow, and they highly suggest using FAT32 if you can avoid file size constraints.
They work well and they have better performance than the free solutions which will be mentioned in the following part. MiniTool Partition Wizard is one representative. But, this solution is slower relatively. And the automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode can be a security risk for your Mac computer. Usually, it is disabled by default and needs some messing around in the Mac terminal to enable it. For example, it had corrupted data before.
Here, we recommend using the paid third-party tools since they are easy-to-use and can do good work for you. Click to tweet.
It offers a day free trial. If you want to use it all the time, you need to pay for it. Additionally, it can mount partitions automatically and safely. More importantly, it can code with the potential corruption. Thus, your Mac is in danger when using this driver.
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However, you can use it to manually mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode if you never mind using the Terminal. This will be safer, but you need to do more work. You can go to google the steps and see how complex they are. It is just for educational purposes, and it is available on Mac OS Perhaps, it will be unstable forever.
Then, the drive can be used on both Mac and PC. There should be some important data on the drive. If you are a personal user, you can try its Professional Edition. Buy Now. Download this software to your computer. Then, you can open the software and input the license key to the pop-out window to get its Professional Edition.
Choosing the Right Format for Your External Hard Drive
If there is more than one NTFS partition, convert all of them one by one. By this way, you can easily format an external hard drive for Mac and PC without losing any data. Then, you can share external hard drive between Mac and PC. You can choose to copy and paste those files to other external devices or internal hard disk of Windows, but it will cost much time. Instead, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition to create a copy for your external drive, which is faster.
Free Download. Firstly, you need to delete the partition by using this software. Just open the software to enter its main interface.
How to Convert an External Hard Drive From Apple to PC
Now what? In fact, it's very simple. When it comes to deleted files; that's exactly what you want. Free Trial Free Trial. Load AnyRecover and choose one of the six available options for data recovery, in this case we are choosing to recover data from an External, formatted and partitioned hard drive External Device Recovery. Select one and continue. AnyRecover takes a moment to scan your disk and search for the specified file type to recover. Don't miss the opportunity to get AnyRecover license at the lowest price on the market.
Get the best of both worlds by sharing your data on MacOS and Windows
Don't know how to apply it, check the instructions here:. What if my files were not found? Fear not. We can take this a step further.
How to Format an External Hard Drive
And select All Around Recovery. All Around Recovery has a deeper scanning mode than External Recovery.
Follow the steps above just as before to locate and recover your files. It is plain to see that AnyRecover for Mac is a tool worthy of top shelf treatment in your arsenal of items that are used to defend, recover and keep your system up and running. Don't get caught without the file you need for that meeting or stumbling looking for baby photos that were stored on disk and suddenly "hid" from your view.
Allow AnyRecover to find and recover your lost files. AnyRecover is easy to use but provides sophisticated results that mean you know what you're doing!