Formatting Exterior Hard Drive For Pc and Mac

Wayne Viger

Honorable
May 9, 2012
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10,510
Hello, i have recently purchased a Seagate Go Flex Desk Hard Drive, 2tb usb3.0, and am wondering how to format it for both pc and mac? Thanks
 
The easiest way to go is to use FAT32, though that's an older filesystem with limitations compared to modern filesystems.

If you use HFS+ (the native Mac filesystem) Windows won't recognize it out-of-the-box; likewise Mac has limited support for NTFS. Full support for either (HFS+ on WIndows or NTFS on Mac) is available through software available online. On Mac, you can also use a hack to enable full read and write for NTFS (http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090913140023382) though that procedure isn't the most user-friendly

Also, current Macs don't support USB 3.0 (they use Thunderbolt instead). The drive will work in a mac's 2.0 port, but will be restricted to slower USB 2.0 speeds.