If you don't want to spend any money and don't have a Seagate drive, an alternative is to format your drive in the exFAT format, which is a Microsoft file system optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards, and is supported on both MacOS and Windows. To format a USB flash drive from File Explorer on Windows 10, use these steps: Open File Explorer. What's even better, if your drive is a Seagate you can download this version for free:Īlternately, if you are running a Windows machine and need to read and write Mac HFS+ disks, Paragon also make a driver utility for Windows too: This costs about $20, but is worth every penny if you do any kind of cross-platform work. If you want to write to NTFS on a Mac, the best solution is: Macs can read NTFS, but normally can't write to it.

macOS will recognize the drive and show its icon on the desktop. The most common Windows drive format is the NTFS system, which modern Windows machines use by default, and which is the format most hard drives come with as standard. 1 Format a USB Drive with a Mac Insert a USB drive into your USB port. ( filesystem operations always envolve risk, and very likely lots of command-line work.) NTFS is the native windows filesystem. the disk can be formatted with windows, or with ntfsprogs on a mac. Is this still correct?įAT32 is supported on both Windows and MacOS but is not recommended(especially for audio files) because of its file size limits. The open-source solution is to install ntfs-3g with macports, and modify your systems auto-mount script.

My previous understanding was that only FAT32 is supported between platforms. Especially so I can save iConnectivity drivers, updates etc. I'd like to have at least one external, USB HDD formatted to work on both Mac & PC.

Format usb stick for mac and pc