Use Disk Utility to Format an External Drive. After you connect an external drive to your Mac, open the Applications folder from the Finder window. The Disk Utility application is located in the Utilities sub-folder. Launch Disk Utility and then click to select the external hard drive listed on the left.

In this article, the TechExploring team will pass the bridge between two operating systems and delve into the reaches of how to best format external hard drive for Mac and PC. Apple and Microsoft do not always see eye to eye when it comes to software technology or even data administration. The two companies have been friendly rivals for decades now and one of the main reasons why users had to pick a side and stick to it was due to the entirely different way that the two very different operating systems read data.

Choice and Convenience Presently, companies or professionals backing up, migrating, transferring, or unifying their data from one operating system to the other do not have many alternatives. They could upload their data to a cloud.

Step 2: Click the File tab at the top-left corner of the window. Step 1: Open the Powerpoint 2010 slideshow for which you want a word count. Word counter for website. But if you want to determine the word count for your entire presentation (or if you are not using speaker notes or hidden slides) then you can follow the directions below. If you need to determine a word count for just your slides, then you will need to create handouts from your slides and export them to Microsoft Word to determine the word count of the slides only. Step 3: Click the Show All Properties link at the bottom of the right column.

However, uploading terabytes of data means hours, if not days of time, not to mention the monthly cloud storage fees. They could create a network between the two. The very different types of data management would require users to install at least one third party program on each operating system. While most of them are available for free, not many users are willing to trust programs that directly affect their hard drives.

Additionally, the Mac and PC may not always be so physically near to each other. For now, the best solution available for portable terabytes of data transfer remains the almighty external HDD. However, an external hard drive for Mac and PC is usually subject to the same data management restrictions imposed by the operating systems. Mac OSX runs data in the HFS+ format, while Windows manages its data with the NTFS format. Nevertheless, the bridge between the two operating systems can be achieved with an external hard drive for Mac and PC formatted as exFAT. On File System Architectures File Allocation Table, otherwise known as FAT, was one of the most used file systems architecture in the early ‘90s.

Windows NT was the first Microsoft operating system that got the opportunity to introduce to the world the New Technology File System, more commonly known as NTFS. The 2000 version also ran optimally on the NTFS format. Windows 2000 also saw a greater popularity than Windows NT. After the launch of Windows XP, the FAT32 system was considered antiquated and was used mainly for flash drives in order to more easily transfer data between PCs that ran with the NTFS format and older PCs that still ran FAT32. Out With The Old The last version of NTFS released by Microsoft was with Windows XP in 2001 which means that PCs have not really seen any update on their file system architecture in a decade and a half. HFS Plus, or HFS+, was proprietarily designed by Apple for the OSX. Its design is an overall upgrade of the Hierarchical File System format, or HFS.

Currently, some support for Microsoft Windows exists but it is very limited and based on only viewing the data and not being able to access it. Both the Windows 10 and Mac OSX operating systems can read files from a FAT32 drive. However, the legacy file system architecture does come with some downsides. First of all, individual file size on FAT32 is capped at 4GB.

The file-size cap limits users who want to transfer long or high-quality video files for example. A second huge drawback of FAT32 drives comes with its partitioning. The largest partition Windows can make on FAT32 is 32GB. Users would have to create over 30 partitions set to FAT32 on a 1TB external hard drive for Mac and PC. The largest partition OSX can make on FAT32 is 2TB, which is definitely a major improvement from Windows but could still be an inconvenience to some users. In With The New! ExFAT is a redesign which was initially presented in 2007.

Although that makes it almost a decade old, it still makes the system statistically newer than NTFS and FAT32. From the very start, exFAT was designed as the go-to format for data backup, storage, and transfer. The file system architecture was made for the best external hard drives.

The following tutorials will teach users how to format an external hard drive for both Mac and PC to exFAT on Mac OSX and Windows 10. How To Format an External Hard Drive For Mac and PC Note: Formatting an external hard drive will remove all the data already present on it. Please, backup any data you are interested in keeping which is already present on the external hard drive for Mac and PC before converting the drive to exFAT. Note: Users will not have to format the same drive to exFAT both on OSX and Windows 10 and should choose whichever operating system is more accessible to them. How to Format an External Hard Drive on Mac OSX In this tutorial, the Tech Exploring team will be covering the latest version of Mac OSX, OSX 10.11 El Capitan.