

If you want something that both machines / OSes can read a write, and that can act as an emergency boot drive for either machine, do this: Using additional software like this will probably create a performance hit, but how noticeable it is depends on your usage pattern. You should choose the filesystem that you plan on using most frequently so that it is as fast as possible and then reformat the disk accordingly. On the Mac, this can be accomplished using add-ons related to the MacFuse project. Look at additional software which will allow for either NTFS or HFS+ to be read on OS X and Windows respectively. This could be used to move data between the Mac and the Windows machine, but would suffer from all the same FAT32 issues mentioned above. In addition to limitation to file sizes < 4 GB, you also lose a lot of nice features on HFS+ such as permissions and journalling.Ĭreate a FAT32 partition on the disk along side the existing HFS+ partition. Reformat the disk to FAT32, which ( as suggested by Michael Sturm) is the lowest common denominator in file systems between OS X and Windows. This file system type is not natively supported by Windows, which is why the disk will not mount when you plug it into your laptop. If it is Mac OS Extended or a something similar then your disk is using the HFS+ file system, which is the default for OS X. the name you see in your file tree when the disk mounts under OS X) what do you see for the Format at the bottom of the window? Here is our pick of the five best external hard drives for Macs.If you open the Disk Utility application on your Mac with the disk connected, you should be able to see it in the list of disks on the left hand column of the Disk Utility window. Here issues such as portability and resilience might not be as important to you but speed of data transfer could well be. The prospect of losing all your work to a damaged drive is not an enticing one.Įven if you use a desktop-based Mac you will soon find the need to add some extra storage to the mix. This can be annoying if you travel around with your Macbook a lot, as it something else to carry and potentially drop. Pretty much as soon as you get it out of the box, you are going to need some form of external storage solution. This is super speedy when it comes to booting into the OS but pretty much useful if you want to use the Mac for what it’s actually really good at – content creation of any sort. Popular laptops such as the Macbook Pro only come with a relatively limited amount of SSD storage. It’s fair to say that a lot of modern laptops are slimming down their internal storage, both to reduce cost and unit weight.
