External hdd

Hello, I am in need of an external hard drive. I have two Mac computers and two iPhones maxed out of storage. So I plan to go buy a external hdd. Here is the question. I have like 300gb of storage from a pc including photos, files, videos, I would like to put on the new hard drive. Will I need to format the new external hard drive for both pc and Mac?


I don’t need to view the data on pc anymore. But I want in all in one place.

Mac mini, macOS 10.13

Posted on Jan 13, 2020 11:23 AM

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Posted on Jan 14, 2020 4:07 AM

The drive can be formatted as ExFAT (developed by Microsoft) and will

be readable by both macOS, Windows and Linux and does not have the FAT32

file limitations. Microsoft created this as a large file size/large volume

size improvement of FAT32 and an alternative to NTFS which is largely

proprietary and ExFAT is not.

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Jan 14, 2020 4:07 AM in response to Farmerjohn180

The drive can be formatted as ExFAT (developed by Microsoft) and will

be readable by both macOS, Windows and Linux and does not have the FAT32

file limitations. Microsoft created this as a large file size/large volume

size improvement of FAT32 and an alternative to NTFS which is largely

proprietary and ExFAT is not.

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Jan 13, 2020 1:15 PM in response to Farmerjohn180

Hello,


You will find that you cannot format a disk to work with Macintosh and Windows and be able to work with large files. You can format an external hard disk as FAT32, which is supported on Macintosh and Windows however it would not support any files larger than 3 GB.

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Jan 14, 2020 7:07 AM in response to Farmerjohn180

You can also buy NTFS for Mac (https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs-mac/) which has been a standard solution for Macs to formatting and reading/writing to/from NTFS volumes for years. For $20 it will make your world much simpler and easier if you want to use NTFS volumes with MacOS.

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External hdd

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