In this utility, click the dropdown menu for File system and select ExFAT, this is a drive format that is compatible with both macOS and Windows for reading and writing data, for more information on ExFAT take a look at these resources.
To format your drive, firstly right click on the external drive listing in Explorer and then select the Format from the dropdown list of options, this will then open the disk formatting utility in Windows. If you’re on a Windows computer, open up Windows Explorer ( +E) and go to This PC, that’s where all of your hard drives and USB drives are listed.īefore we go any further you will want to make sure that you have copied all of your data such as files and folders from the external hard drive as the formatting process permanently deletes all of the files and data on the drive. Luckily you can format your drive so it does just this, I shall be showing you how in this article. So let’s say that you have a external hard drive and you want to use this portable hard drive with both Mac and Windows computers, to access your files and folders flawlessly without any issues.
