formatting a mac external hard drive for windows

#Formatting a mac external hard drive for windows verification#
#Formatting a mac external hard drive for windows Pc#
#Formatting a mac external hard drive for windows windows#

#Formatting a mac external hard drive for windows Pc#

It comes down to which OS are you going to use the drive with? WDĪccording to the list above, formatting your hard drive to exFAT so that you can read and write on either a PC or Mac seems like the obvious solution.

Required for local Time Machine backups.

Natively read/write HFS+ on MacOS High Sierra and newer.

You never know when you will need that footage from a three-year-old project. No matter how you label your hard drives, just make sure you keep track of them. I recently had Kermit the Frog and Optimus Prime hard drives. If you are a parent, like myself, you can also use any stickers you have lying around the house. You easily put them on your external drive to keep track of them. You can also use hard drive labels, which are the awesome stickers featured above. You can simply use some masking tape or gaff tape, and then write the name of the drive. There are plenty of ways you can label your drives.

#Formatting a mac external hard drive for windows verification#

Use checksum verification to make sure everything is copied correctly. Remember that external drives should be used temporarily - and all footage should be backed up elsewhere. Another project used Tom Hanks characters - Forrest and Woody. For instance, one project had several external drives, all of which were named after different Will Ferrell characters - Mugatu, Megamind, Lord Business, and Ron Burgundy. One of my personal tricks is naming all drives after an actor. This includes the way you name the drive and how you label it. If you will be using multiple external hard drives on a project, you’ll want to make sure to keep them organized. Right-Click on the external hard drive in the Volume tab.ħ.

#Formatting a mac external hard drive for windows windows#

Right-Click on the Windows icon in the lower left-hand corner.ģ. Select exFat (or MS-DOS FAT for a FAT32 format).ġ. Name the hard drive with a name of your choice.ġ0. Click Options, Select Master Boot Record, and click OK.Ĩ. Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.ħ. Select the external hard drive on the left-hand side.Ħ. Click Go on the top tool bar, and select Utilities.Ĥ. Connect the external hard drive to the computer.Ģ. That said, if you are using smaller file sizes - FAT32 can suffice. The maximum individual file size for exFAT is 16 EB. The best format for video production is exFAT. A single high resolution file can easily go over 4 GB, so Fat32 may not the best format.

The limitation affects both Mac and PC users. FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4 GB per file. This will allow you to use the hard drive on both a Mac and PC.įAT32 is often used among general users, but FAT32 has limitations that can affect filmmakers. To do this, you will need to use either exFAT or FAT32 formats. If you need to send them RAW files or an edited sequence, you will need to make sure the external hard drive is set up for both operating systems. You may be using only Macs or PCs in your own office, but you will also need to take into account what type of machines your client is using. That said, if you are using both a PC and Mac in the workflow, you’ll need to use a different format. Hard drives set up for use on Windows machines only will often use NTFS, while Macs will use HFS+. Formatting the Hard DriveĪ vast majority of video production will be done on a Mac or Windows operating system, so we aren’t going to cover Linux. Let’s take a look at the different types of formats, and which are best for video production. If you work solely on a Mac, but need to send files to someone working on a PC, your external hard drive needs to be set up for both operating systems. Eventually you will find out that you may not be working on the same operating system (OS) as others. Use these steps to format external hard drives for both operating systems.Īs a video editor or Digital Imaging Technician, you will often need to share files with others.

Video editors will often find that they need to share files between a PC and a Mac.