If you're interested in formatting USB drives for business use, it is crucial to understand that the process depends on whether your company primarily uses Windows PCs, Macs or a mix of both. Here are the step-by-step procedures for all three use cases.
Brand-new USB drives, from single thumbsticks to USB wristbands sold wholesale, cannot be immediately used and recognized by a computer because they have not yet been formatted to use a file system that the computer can recognize. Depending on the OS your business computers use the most, you have three formatting options: NTFS, APFS or exFAT.
Usb Format For Mac And Pc
There are tools available to use NTFS on a Mac (Fuse) or HFS on PC (HFSExplorer). Another option, for those who use both Windows and Mac OS regularly, is to partition your hard drive and have a portion of the drive formatted for each OS.
Formatting a USB flash drive can be a great option if you want to erase your data from the flash drive with speed and efficiency or if you want to use your flash drive on a different operating system. By taking the time to format your USB drive, this will ultimately optimise its performance.
In Disk Utility, you can format an external disk that you can use with both a Microsoft Windows-based computer and a Mac. For example, you might want to do this if you use a flash drive to store data files you need to use on your Mac at home and when using a Windows-based computer at school or the public library.
Thumb drives, by default, often ship with a Windows file system incompatible to Macs. When these incompatibly formatted thumb drives are connected to a Mac, macOS displays a warning, as shown in Figure A.
When you click Erase, macOS will initialize the thumb drive using the file format you specified. Once the process completes, macOS will display an operation successful message, as shown in Figure C.
Fortunately, there are two file systems supported by Mac and PC. In other words, you can use USB with one of the file systems to easily access Windows and Mac and transfer data. You need to format the USB as exFAT or FAT32, both of which are supported by Mac and PC. But what are the specific differences between exFAT and FAT32? Please refer to the table below:
In addition to formatting, it also has many practical functions, such as: Merge Partition, Disk Clone, Migrate OS from MBR disk to MBR SSD or HDD. If you want to Recover Lost Partition, Convert FAT32 to NTFS without Data Loss, please upgrade to AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. You can free download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard to see how it works.
Step 2. Choose the exFAT file systemon this pageIf you want to format to FAT32 file system, then please choose FAT32. You are allowed to edit the partition labels and select cluster size at the same time. Click OK.
In addition to using AOMEI Partition Assistant to format the USB, Diskpart is also a good choice. But you need to note that Diskpart does not support formatting USB drives larger than 32G to FAT32. If you have such a need, please choose method 1.
You can use Diskpart and AOMEI Partition Assistant to format USB for Mac and PC on Windows. Obviously, using AOMEI Partition Assistant has fewer restrictions on formatting USB drives. When formatting the USB to FAT32, you don't need to worry about the 32 GB partition size limit of AOMEI products.
Yes, exFAT is compatible with both Mac and Windows computers. You can set this file system format to an external hard drive so as to use it for data transferring between Mac and Windows without any read or write issues.
Every operating system works based on the files and folders, given that Windows and Mac have been the widely used operating systems, understanding how to work with the file systems on both devices. Unfortunately, Windows and Mac systems work with different file systems, which should make it difficult to format a flash or USB drive and then use it interchangeably between the Mac and Windows devices.
Before we can move ahead in finding how to format a USB drive for PC and Mac, we need to find which file systems work on the two major operating systems. Having obtained complete information on which file formats work on the individual operating systems, we can easily find the file system that can be compatible with both platforms.
If you are checking out the options for how to format a USB drive for PC or Mac, Windows does provide you access to several options. You can either go with the built-in option or opt for a third-party tool as per your preferences.
EaseUS Partition Master is one of the unique and great options that can be used for getting access to a great degree of compatibility with how to format USB drive for PC and Mac. It supports for a wide range of file systems that you can work with it.
Well, formatting a USB drive so that it is compatible with both Mac and Windows can be quite simple if you are aware of which file systems to choose from. While there are several methods available for formatting a USB drive for PC and Mac, using a third-party utility - EaseUS Partition Master can prove to be one of the excellent options.
Note this approach to formatting a drive for Mac and Windows PC compatibility are the same on basically every version of MacOS and Mac OS X, but the screenshots may look slightly different depending on your OS version. The result is still the same however when it comes to formatting the drive.
Mac users can mount and read NTFS formatted Windows drives, making NTFS compatible with the Mac on the reading and mounting front, but writing to an NTFS drive requires using either third party software or enabling NTFS write support on the Mac using an experimental functionality bundled on the Mac. This is less than ideal for most users however, so while NTFS is compatible with a Mac and Windows PC, if you want to do heavy file sharing between the two with a lot of reading and writing, you may be better off formatting a drive as FAT32 as discussed above.
The MS DOS FAT cuts the availability of space on the flash drive. I have a 16gb SanDisk that I wanted to put a movie onto. The movie was 8gb. It gave me errors and would not copy the file. Said format problem. So I reformatted to Apple (journaled) and had no more problems. But now, of course, a PC cannot read the flash drive. A POX ON MICROSOFT!!!!!
If you're still having problems with the disk after trying this, you might try omitting the quick from step 9 to do a full format. That will take a very long time and usually isn't necessary, but may help uncover physical damage to the disk.
Of course, you can format the drive for both Windows and Mac. In Windows, the best format tool I recommend is EaseUS Partition Master, and in Mac, Disk Utility is a better choice to format the drive to exFAT format for both Mac and Windows.
Are you looking for what format works on both Mac and PC? If you have two different computer systems and want to copy and transfer files between them, finding a compatible file system format is necessary. Most USB formats are NTFS by default, while the common format for Mac is generally APFS. Next, let's explore what formats are compatible with Mac and PC.
Although there are many file systems, not each supports Mac and PC. To format without errors, we need to choose the correct format. There are three types of formats that can be used on Mac. But they have some differences, let's take a look.
The best file formats supported on Mac and Windows are exFAT and FAT32. If you want the drive to be compatible with Mac and PC, you will need to format the drive for both systems. And exFAT32 has a limit on file size, while exFAT supports maximum partitions and can also store files larger than 4GB.
By the above part, do you know what format works on both Mac and PC? Yes, the formats supported by both Mac and PC are FAT32 and exFAT. Then do you know how to format the drive to a common file system for both Mac and PC? I will provide two ways next.
There are several ways to format to exFAT format on Windows. One of the easiest is to take advantage of a reliable three-way tool: EaseUS Partition Master Free. This all-in-one free partition manager can easily support any format to exFAT. It is ideal for novice users. You can format drives that work on Mac and PC in just a few easy steps.
Right-click the external drive or USB you intend to format and choose "Format".
Set the Partition label, File system (NTFS/FAT32/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4/exFAT), and Cluster size, then click "OK".
Click "Yes" to continue.
Click the "Execute 1 Task(s)" button and click "Apply" to format the hard drive partition.
Besides formatting drives easily, EaseUS Partition Master also can convert NTFS to FAT32 for Mac and PC or convert MBR to GPT. It can also adjust disk space or check disk. It is one of the best free disk managers. If you want to use other tools to format to exFAT on Windows, you can also choose Disk Management or File Explorer. And you can click the links below to see the exact steps.
In Mac, two ways to format drives can be used for both Mac and PC. I will introduce a simple method. Disk Utility is a tool for Mac that can change the file system or format internal and external drives. The steps are as follows.
With this guide, do you know what format works on Mac and PC? Both FAT32 and exFAT are good choices. FAT32 is outstanding in compatibility, but it is limited to 4GB of files. While exFAT supports partitions larger than 2TB and 4GB files. Moreover, formatting compatible drives for Mac and PC is not a difficult task. You can do it with EaseUS Partition Master on PC or use Disk Utility to format on Mac. 2ff7e9595c
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