Best Format For Usb Drive Mac And Windows

BEST FORMAT FOR USB DRIVE AND WINDOWS MAC OS CURRENTLY INCLUDE

Best Format For Usb Drive And Windows Mac OS Currently Include

EFS is available only on hard drives and USB drives formatted with Microsoft New. So, if you want to use an external hard drive on both Windows and Mac, you need to format it to a filesystem that is compatible with Windows PC and Mac.Windows and Mac OS currently include Host-based firewalll protection. They are incompatible with each other. Windows uses NTFS and Mac uses HFS. Windows PC and Mac use different filesystems. Need to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows.

The files system cannot work with any higher file size than that.How do you tell which format your brand-new USB drive has? Hook it up to your Mac and launch the Disk Utility app, located in your Utilities folder (which is in Applications). When using a FAT32 file system, the prime issue is that it is limited to 4GB in size. If the drive comes formatted in NTFS, which is the default file system for Windows, you're going to want to re-format the drive because Mac OS X can't write files to NTFS-formatted volumes (at least not without a bunch of extra work that's beyond the scope of this article).Most of the flash drives available today come with the FAT32 file system and thus offer a high degree of compatibility across Mac and Windows rather effectively. The first format, FAT32, is fully compatible with Mac OS X, though with some drawbacks that we'll discuss later.

It also includes support for features from OS X Lion, such as Versions. I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the other three formats below.Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - This is the default file system format for Mac OS X drives.Advantages: Formatting your USB flash drive this way will give you full interoperability with Macs. Unless you have extraordinary needs, you can safely ignore two of them: Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) and Free Space. If the drive is listed as NTFS-formatted, you're going to need to format it to something else if you want full compatibility with Mac OS X.There are several possible file system formats you can use for a USB flash drive, and changing them in Disk Utility is as easy as selecting the number of partitions you want on the drive (usually just one), picking the format you want for the drive, and clicking 'Apply.' Note that this will erase all information on the drive, so make absolutely sure you've got copies of everything before moving forward.Disk Utility gives you five different choices for drive formats in OS X Lion. This is useful if a drive is being used under both Operating System (OS)to.If the drive's format comes up as MS-DOS (FAT) or, less likely, ExFAT, you may be able to simply leave the drive as-is and not bother reformatting it.

You can also move files to video game systems like the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii. A drive formatted this way can easily transfer files between Macs and PCs. Otherwise, you may need to consider one of the file formats discussed below.MS-DOS (FAT) - This is Disk Utility's name for the FAT32 filesystem.Advantages: FAT32 offers near-universal interoperability with virtually every computing system on the planet. If you're transferring files from Macs to PCs, this won't be an issue however, transferring files from PCs to Macs won't be possible if your drive is formatted in 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled).' If you will only be working with Macs and not PCs, this may not be an issue. The 'Mac OS Extended (Journaled)' option will have the highest degree of support for Mac OS X features, and there's no limit to the size of files you can put on the drive.Disadvantages: Windows-running PCs can read files from drives formatted this way, but they can't write to them (at least not without the same amount of work it takes to get OS X to write to NTFS-formatted drives).

However, those downsides may be more than outweighed by FAT32's near-universal support, and if you don't think you're going to be dealing with files bigger than 4 GB, this may be the optimal choice.ExFAT - A newer file format, supported in Mac OS X 10.6.5 or later.Advantages: exFAT has many of the same advantages as FAT32 in that it's a disk format that offers interoperability between Macs and PCs. Furthermore, FAT32 doesn't support OS X Lion's Versions feature - something users have discovered the hard way when working directly off of files stored on a USB flash drive (something we recommend against doing). You also can't create a startup drive for your Mac using this format. It's the closest thing we have to a universal file system format, which is why most flash drives are formatted this way right out of the box.Disadvantages: FAT32 doesn't support files larger than 4 GB, and that's its greatest drawback.

Best Format For Usb Drive Mac And Windows