Is there a way by which an external hard disk can be used on Mac as well as Windows laptops with R/W?

exFAT works, but at one point in time you needed to format the drive on the PC instead of the Mac. Something like "sector size" that Mac sets that does not agree with PC but PC setting agrees with Mac. That may have been fixed since.

steve359 wrote:

exFAT works, but at one point in time you needed to format the drive on the PC instead of the Mac. Something like "sector size" that Mac sets that does not agree with PC but PC setting agrees with Mac. That may have been fixed since.

IIRC the drive needs to be formatted on the Mac using Disk Utility since macOS cannot read all of the sector sizes Windows uses with exFAT. From what I understand Windows may use larger sector sizes which macOS cannot understand. I also don't know if Apple has addressed this issue yet.

I will not argue. I just recall that when formatted on one machine, it did not work on the other and formatting had to be repeated on the "other". I apologize to the OP if I gave incorrect information.

No worries as there isn't much information about it out there. I just recall a post on these forums from a year ago which mentioned it and the contributor provided a link to the information, but unfortunately I no longer have it. At least the OP knows it is possible and it works best one way. :-)

HWTech wrote:

IIRC the drive needs to be formatted on the Mac using Disk Utility since macOS cannot read all of the sector sizes Windows uses with exFAT. From what I understand Windows may use larger sector sizes which macOS cannot understand. I also don't know if Apple has addressed this issue yet.

I don't know about that. I've never had problems with ExFat drives formatted on a Windows computer. But I likely have not experienced every possible scenario.

BobTheFisherman wrote:

I don't know about that. I've never had problems with ExFat drives formatted on a Windows computer. But I likely have not experienced every possible scenario.

It may only happen with Win10 when using larger drives. See the third answer in this thread which mentions the larger sector size (unfortunately I don't see a way to provide a direct link). The thread also shows people having issues reading exFAT drives formatted by a Mac.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/0cabfefb-5030-4cce-b640-e8ee72bf1644/cannot-read-exfat-drives-created-on-mac-os?forum=w8itproappcompat

Yes, the issue of drives formatted ExFat by Macs has been a known issue for a long time hence the often quoted recommendation that when formatting a drive ExFat that a Windows computer be used. My understanding from reading your post is that the opposite is now true.

Hah! I'm not crazy. Reading this thread I started out thinking, "I know I had to format the drive on my work Windows computer for my work Mac to read it but I think I remember doing that later at home and wound up reformatting it on my Mac so both could read/write." So maybe inbetween OS versions changed. Or maybe it was the size of the drive. Or the weather.

Yes - format drive as exFAT which is compatible with both Mac and Windows.

For smaller drives with small amounts of data, you can also use FAT32 - but there is a 4GB file limit for this.