To erase an external hard drive for Mac and PC with Disk management, you need to take the following steps: This tool makes it possible for Windows users to initialize a new drive, extend a basic volume, shrink a partition, assign a new drive letter, format a hard drive, and so forth. Method 2 Format An External Hard Drive for Mac and PC with Disk Management on Windowsĭisk Management is a system utility dedicated to helping Windows users perform advanced tasks related to storage devices. Step 5 Hit the Erase button situated at the lower-right corner of the Erase window to make the formatting process start and then click Done. Step 4 Give a new name to your external hard drive, select exFAT or FAT as the target format, and choose a partition scheme in the Erase dialogue. Step 3 Select the external hard drive under External listed in the left sidebar and click the Erase menu from the top toolbar.

Step 2 Click the Launchpad icon in the Dock and head to Other > Disk Utility. Step 1 Connect the external hard drive you want to format for Mac and PC to your Mac computer. To erase an external hard drive for Mac and PC with Disk Utility, here is what you should do: With the help of Mac Disk Utility, you can do a series of operations on your storage devices, including disk erasure, disk repair, disk partitioning, disk ejection, and disk renaming, to name a few.

Method 1 Format An External Hard Drive for Mac and PC with Disk Utility on Macĭisk Utility is a built-in disk management tool designed for managing internal and external storage devices detected by your Mac machine.

Hence, exFAT can be the first choice when you plan to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC to handle large files and partitions. In terms of compatibility, either FAT32 or exFAT can be regarded as the target file system in this instance, but FAT32 doesn’t support a file size larger than 4GB.Ĭompared with FAT32, exFAT can work with larger files and partitions and has no maximum 4GB file size limit. To sum it up, Mac uses HFS, HFS+, APFS, FAT32, and exFAT file systems, and Windows uses NTFS, FAT32, and exFAT file systems.

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