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Formatting thumb drives for mac and pc

However, it also increases the time it takes to format the drive quite considerably.

Can I Use Any Flash Drive on a Mac? | Your Business

You can download CleanMyMac X for free here. Which should you choose? The main reason for formatting a USB drive as Fat32 on a Mac is that you want to be able to use the drive on a Windows PC, as well as a Mac — perhaps to transfer files between the two machines. You may also be preparing the drive for use as, say, a storage device for a media player or to record TV programmes on a TV with a USB port. The fact that Fat32 can be read from and written to on both Mac and Windows makes it very versatile.

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However, there is a significant limitation — individual files have a maximum size of 4GB. There is a solution, however, exFAT. If you look for a quick and easy way to manage your drives, try using CleanMyDrive 2. HFS is the Mac file system. Just be aware that the Mac-only formats are typically not readable by Windows machines without some third party software on the PC.

Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to the OSXDaily newsletter to get more of our great Apple tips, tricks, and important news delivered to your inbox! Enter your email address below:. I may be wrong on that size tho. I wish there was a universal filesystem everyone could use natively without these trappings on each individual OS.

This is not possible because Microsoft and Apple work a lot to avoid Linux users being happy and doing everything more easily than they already do. I have avoided exFat for the exact same reasons as noted by the posters above; extremely slow transfer rates.

How to Format a Drive for Mac & PC Compatibility

I use a mac between http: Or does this only play a role when trying to reformat the drive under Windows? I know that fails for sure if the drive is previously set to use a GUID partition table. FAT32 may be universal-ish, but MS left it behind for good reasons besides the file size limit. Apple seemed to have no trouble reverse-engineering FAT compatibility or did they license it? Ars Technica was still saying it was coming to the Mac in a commercial implementation a year ago: However, all references to this feature have been silently removed. It must be Master Boot Record. No, why should an operating system support the file systems of other operating systems?

There should be a file system which is designed for external media and supports large files and large volumes, just like all other modern file systems. FAT was designed by Microsoft and is patented by Microsoft.


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Every who wants to use FAT has to pay Microsoft. They have to pay Microsoft to use FAT. Almost every device supports FAT.

Format A Flash Drive For Both Mac OS X And Windows

Every device just supports it. They should have introduced a completely new, open and completely independent file system which is designed for external devices and is free to use by everyone.

Mac 101: Format choices for USB flash drives

Could Ext4 and coming newer versions be a perfect candidate for this? I always have to think of this particular XKCD comic when talking about this ; http: The reality is we all live in a world of mixed platforms, always have and probably always will.

The OS that has the widest support usually becomes the most popular. Although we know its limitation of 4gb file size only. So, after an hour research I am able to find three solutions for it: Create two partitions on your hard drive to use with each OS, separately. You can create,delete,format,resize boot camp partition,repartition without any data loss, can make bootable DVD by Stellar partition manager. I found this tool really easy to use and efficient. Wanted to copy a large video file so needed to use exFAT.

I do not like encryption, how do i do it. I have inherited three Macs. I was planning to use them but now I am convinced that Apple is interested in creating compatibility issues, worse that microsoft, so I am switching to Linux. And after the instructions, I tried to boot into Windows. And then I see that is says something like: Press Enter to try again.

But to make that decision, you need to understand the two major factors that can affect your file system choice: Many distros of Linux like Ubuntu are prepared to deal with this file system problem. In addition to this, your home consoles Xbox , Playstation 4 only provide limited support for certain filesystems, and only provide read access to the USB drives.


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  7. In order to better understand the best filesystem for your needs, take a look at this helpful chart. Keep in mind that this chart chose the native abilities of each OS to use these file systems.

    Volume Format

    The takeaway from this chart on portability is that FAT32 having been around for so long is supported on almost all devices. The large disk sizes of today were only theoretical in those days, so it probably seemed ridiculous to the engineers that anyone would ever need a file larger than 4 GB. When stacked up against the competition, we see very quickly that FAT32 is showing its age in terms of file size limits.

    Every newer file system handily whips FAT32 in the file size department, allowing for sometimes ridiculously large files.