Portioning a ssd external drive.

If you want to share a drive between macOS and Windows, then format the drive as exFAT. Make sure to use Disk Utility on macOS to erase the drive as exFAT since Windows may use a file allocation size that macOS may not like.

If you are using macOS 14.x Sonoma, then there is a chance you may experience some issues with exFAT since Apple has changed the exFAT driver from a Kernel driver to a userland driver which entailed a major rewrite of the driver so there may be some issues since writing a file system driver is very difficult and takes time to work out the bugs.

Calieco wrote:

I am considering changing my external hard drives (2) to ssd to 1 ssd. Would like yo know if it can be portioned to iOS and windows.

No.

iOS is a mobile device (iPhone for example) operating system.

Neither Microsoft nor Boot Camp support installing Windows on an external drive.

Hello Calieco 👋, hope you’re doing okay. We didn’t fully get your issue but by the looks of it you want your external hard drives data from both drives to be stored in a bigger drive. In order to do so make sure all 3 drives are connected to a device that can read the format of both drives. Copy the data from both of the other drives to the main drive you want the data to be transferred to. Before doing this I also saw you want your drive to be seen in iOS and Windows. If you want to do this you will need to plug the external drive(where you want your data to be stored at) into a Mac device or a windows device and format the drive to exFAT which is a FileSystem that is readable by iOS, Windows, macOS and etc. You can safely copy the data to the drive and it should pop up on your iPhone or your Windows device.

prabolo

Calieco wrote:

Sorry using the wrong operating system in posts. I would be attacking it to my iMac and want to use it to keep “files” where I use Mac and windows through boot camp.

Now I better understand what it is you want to do.

If it were me I would get 2 SSDs and format one NTFS for Windows created files/data and the other for files/data created in your MacOS partition.