• External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows
• External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc
• Format Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows

Tom Brant The Best External Hard Drives for Mac Looking to add storage, or for a smart way to back up your Mac? Here's what you need to know, along with our top-rated Apple-friendly drives. We've tested SSDs and platter-based drives alike.

The Right Connections Buying an external hard drive for your Mac is not all that different from buying one for your Windows PC, except for one very important complication: Newer and only come with Thunderbolt 3 ports, but the arrival of Thunderbolt 3-equipped drives has been a trickle, rather than a flood. Most of the current models are designed for photographers and video editors who need to store mountains of footage and access it very quickly. As a result, they are typically SSDs or arrays, which means they're also very expensive.

So what's a Mac user who just wants to back up his or her files using Time Machine to do? Windows video editor like imovie. Read on as we answer that question, along with all of your other Mac external storage quandaries. A New File System. Thunderbolt 3 and USB Type-C are the latest innovations in the external storage market, but before we get to them, we need to address a basic building block of hard drives that has always affected compatibility, and probably always will: the file system. An external drive's file system is the most important factor that determines whether or not it's readable by Macs, PCs, or both. Since the late 1990s, Apple has used the Mac OS Extended file system, commonly abbreviated as HFS+, to power its laptop and desktop computers.

External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows

The best portable storage drives The best external storage to fit your needs: a compact and speedy SSD, a durable USB drive and a 4TB external hard drive. Possibly the best solution to using a hard drive with both Windows and Mac without the use of third-party software is creating two partitions on the drive, one for Windows and one for Mac.

But with the release of the operating system, Cupertino switched to an entirely new file format. It's simply called the, and it's the first format to be used on Apple computers as well as the iOS ecosystem of,, iPods, the Apple TV, and the Apple Watch. There are many benefits to switching from HFS+ to the Apple File System, including better security thanks to native encryption, but the most important thing to note for external drive shoppers is backward-compatibility. Any drive formatted with HFS+ (which includes most Mac-specific drives on the market today) will work just fine with a Mac that's running macOS High Sierra. Neither Apple File System nor HFS+ works with Windows, however. If you plan to use your external drive with computers that run both operating systems, you should consider a drive formatted with the exFAT file system. Microsoft introduced exFAT about a decade ago, which means that it's still relatively young, as far as file systems go.

External Hard Drive For Both Mac And Pc

You won't get the security and efficiency of Apple File System, but you will get the convenience of being able to transfer files back and forth between Windows and macOS simply by plugging in and unplugging your drive. Of course, you can easily reformat almost any drive you buy, so you're not limited to buying only those intended for use with Macs. If you really fancy a drive formatted for Windows (which will usually come preformatted in the NTFS format), you can use the Disk Utility in macOS to reformat it after you bring it home from the store. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but they're rare.

Format Hard Drive For Both Mac And Windows

Get a standard external drive, put whatever you want on it, and get a second and on a regular basis (once a week or month, give or take) copy everything from the main drive to the backup. Maybe even get a third, and rotate them in and out, possibly storing one at a friend's house, or in a safety deposit box. Photo by Sharon Vaknin/CNET If you need to expand your storage space with an external hard drive and you use both Mac and PC, you'll likely run into a few obstacles.

The only drive we've tested recently that isn't Mac-compatible even if it's formatted is the pro-oriented, which uses a lightning-quick Intel SSD inside. It relies on firmware that requires Intel motherboards that aren't found in any Mac computers. Spinning Drive Once you've settled on a file system, you then have to determine which storage medium you want:. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and—unlike the file system—the type you buy is the type you're stuck with for the life of the drive. A solid-state drive (SSD) offers quick access to your data because it stores your bits in a type of flash memory rather than on spinning platters. SSDs are often smaller and lighter than spinning external drives, as well, which is also thanks to the lack of moving parts.