how to format a windows wd external hard drive for mac

Volume Label: This is the drive name that will appear when you see your formatted drive in File Explorer.Generally, you never need to modify this setting, so use the default allocation unit size that appears (usually 4096 bytes for NTFS) when you select the file system you want. Allocation Unit Size: This is the basic block size used by the file system when you format your drive.If you want the drive to be readable and writable on a Mac as well, choose exFAT. In general, you’ll want to select NTFS if the drive will only be used with Windows. Depending on the drive’s size, your options will be FAT, FAT32, NTFS, or exFAT. File System: A file system is a data structure that tells an operating system how to save and load files to or from a disk.Formatting takes up some of the raw disk space because of how file systems work.

Capacity: This will be the data capacity of your hard drive or SSD once it is formatted.There are two separate versions listed on the Seagate site, one for macOS 10.10 to 10.15, and another for the Macs running an Apple silicon chip. Or, if you bought an external hard drive from Seagate, it should come with Paragon Driver to let you read and write data interchangeably on Windows and Mac without formatting the drive. You can use a third-party app to write to an NTFS disk on a Mac. As a consequence, you won’t be able to add, change, or delete files. On macOS, you can only read disks in this format, not write to them. Is your external hard drive showing up as “read only” on your Mac? This usually happens because the drive is formatted with Microsoft’s NTFS file format.

Here’s a guide to macOS disk permissions to help you understand the technical concepts. This lets you set the permissions to Read & Write to yourself while keeping the read-only for other users. If this is a drive you formatted yourself, you can change the individual permissions in the box above. You won’t see this option if the external storage is used as a boot drive or a Time Machine backup drive.

How to format a windows wd external hard drive for mac