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Using a PC formatted external drive possible on a Mac ?

My internal mac drives succeed to mount an external PC drive but i cant copy any folder in it or maybe im just bad, any suggestions to use a PC external drive on a Mac please ?

Posted on Jan 6, 2022 10:08 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 6, 2022 10:11 AM

Depends on how its formatted.


If the drive is formatted as NTFS for Windows, the Mac can read from it, but cannot write to it.

If its formatted as Fat32, Fat16 or exFat then the Mac can read and right to it without issues.


If the formatting needs to be kept as NTFS for some reason, you will need to use an NTFS driver to let the Mac write to the drive.

Link-> https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs-mac/


Otherwise, for usage between a Mac and PC, its better to use exFAT unless you need to the features provided by NTFS for some reason.

1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 6, 2022 10:11 AM in response to skanner21

Depends on how its formatted.


If the drive is formatted as NTFS for Windows, the Mac can read from it, but cannot write to it.

If its formatted as Fat32, Fat16 or exFat then the Mac can read and right to it without issues.


If the formatting needs to be kept as NTFS for some reason, you will need to use an NTFS driver to let the Mac write to the drive.

Link-> https://www.paragon-software.com/us/home/ntfs-mac/


Otherwise, for usage between a Mac and PC, its better to use exFAT unless you need to the features provided by NTFS for some reason.

Using a PC formatted external drive possible on a Mac ?

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