what is the best format for external hard drive mac

You aren't stuck with your drive formatted for one platform forever. With it installed, you'll be able to read/write to APFS drives on a Windows PC.

Option 2: Format to APFS and use a different Paragon appĬonversely, you can format the HD to APFS and use Paragon's APFS for Windows to read and write to the Mac-formatted hard drive. It's $20, and is compatible with all Macs, even the more recently announced M1 Macs. In order to enable read/write access, you'll need to purchase a third-party solution such as Paragon NTFS. In other words, you can look at files saved on the drive, but you can't save any new files from your Mac. If you keep your hard drive's out-of-the-box NTFS format, you'll be able to read the drive when it's connected to a Mac, but you won't be able to write to it. Option 1: Format to NTFS and buy this app for your Mac The alternative solutions do require more tinkering. The good news is, it's not exFAT or nothing. OK, what are my alternatives to using exFAT? And the same can be said for a Windows HD, if you only plan on connecting it to a PC, then NTFS is the way to go. However, if you plan on only using a drive on your Mac and it has MacOS High Sierra or newer installed, you'll want to stick to Apple's APFS format. And if that's how you plan on using your drive, then you're right - exFAT is the way to go.

It comes down to which OS are you going to use the drive with?Īccording to the list above, formatting your hard drive to exFAT so that you can read and write on either a PC or Mac seems like the obvious solution.

Natively read/write HFS+ on MacOS High Sierra and newer.

Required for local Time Machine backupsĪPFS (Hierarchical File System, aka Mac OS Extended).

Natively read/write HFS+ on MacOS up to Mac OS X Sierra.

HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, aka Mac OS Extended)

Full NTFS support on Mac requires paid third-party app.

Natively read/write exFAT on Windows and MacOS.

But before I can dig into what makes sense when, look over this quick rundown of the different standards and which OS each one is compatible with. The file format standard you use for your external drive will depend on how you plan on using the drive.

What is the best format for external hard drive mac