how to format for mac and pc flash drive

What is NTFS? I’m not going to explain here you can read more on Wikipedia. I then right-clicked the external drive icon on Mac desktop > Get Info. If I wanted to use it with Mac OS or Time Machine backup (which is my intent), I’ll need to format the drive for my Mac. It brought me to a webpage on Seagate’s site, where it clearly indicated the drive was initially set up to work with a Windows PC. Since I wanted to use it on Mac, I clicked the blue logo with the text “Start_Here-Mac”. When I opened it, the default content was all there. When I connected the Seagate to my Mac, the drive icon showed up like this. Three weeks ago, I bought a brand new 2TB Seagate Expansion to backup my MacBook Pro before I updated it to the latest macOS. Most External Hard Drives Are Initiated with NTFSĭuring the last several years, I’ve used a few external drives, including a 500GB WD My Passport, 32GB Lexar flash drive, and a few others. I highly recommend you also create multiple partitions. Pro tip: If your external drive has a large volume, like mine – a 2TB Seagate Expansion. The operation will erase all data and your files will be gone for good. Important note: If you have useful files stored on the external drive, be sure to copy or transfer them to another safe place prior to formatting.

Just follow this easy step-by-step guide and you’re all set. In this post, I’m going to show you how to format your external drive for a Mac-compatible file system i.e.

Apple Mac machines support a different file system. That’s all because it’s been initialized with Windows NT File System (NTFS), which is primarily for PCs. But somehow, macOS doesn’t allow you to write data to the drive. So, you just bought a new external hard drive or a portable SSD and wanted to use it on your Mac.

How to format for mac and pc flash drive