formatting a flash drive in windows for a mac

Formatting A Flash Drive In Windows For A Free Trial Of

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The Mac versus PC debate isnt going to be settled anytime soon but theres no denying that Windows computers are more widespread.

For this reason, many manufacturers of external hard drives and USB sticks pre-format their devices to NTFS.

This format was created for Microsoft and allows users to quickly plug their drives into Windows machines and work with files.

As NTFS is proprietary, Apple would need a special license to use it fully on the Macs they sell.

Instead of doing this, macOS has been designed to read NTFS-formatted drives but not write to them.

In other words, as a Mac user you can only open and view files on Windows drives: you cant change them in anyway, nor can you copy new files to NTFS format disks.

In this guide, youll discover several solutions to this dilemma from formatting drives to a more universal file system to using third-party tools.

This is simple to do and means the data on your driveUSB stick can be read and written on both Macs and PCs.

Be aware that the FAT32 format isnt as efficient as NTFS: it only supports files sizes of up to 4GB.

This may pose a problem if youre using the drive to store high-quality videos.

More information on FAT32 versus NTFS is available from Microsoft Support.

To get started, click the Spotlight icon at the top right of your screen and enter Disk to launch Disk Utility.

Insert your NTFS drive or USB stick and click to highlight the disk name in the white box on the left-hand side of the window.

Enter a new name for the drive in the field above if you wish.

Read the warning carefully before proceeding, as this process will delete any existing data on the drive.

From now on youll be able to move files to your drive and edit them in place from a Mac or PC.

Use a third-party app The fact that macOS doesnt support Windows NTFS drives out of the box has led to the development of a number of third-party apps, which are licensed to both read and write to Windows disks.

These can be particularly helpful if you regularly have to plug your drive into both a Mac and PC both use file sizes larger than that supported by the more universal FAT32 format.

Formatting A Flash Drive In Windows For A Free Trial Of

One of the strongest contenders for macOS is Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon, which offers a ten-day free trial of its features.

Once installed, the app will mount your Windows drives allowing you to change or remove files to your hearts content.

At the time of writing there doesnt seem to be any freeware macOS programs offering NTFS write support, which may put off users on a budget.

This is an experimental feature and could lead to data loss, so make sure to do a full backup of both your Mac and any data on the drive before continuing.

The main benefit of using Terminal in this way is that its quick to do and no third-party software is required.

As this feature is still in the testing phase however, your files could become corrupted at anytime, so proceed with caution.

Formatting A Flash Drive In Windows For A Mac