FORMAT HARD DRIVE FOR USE ON MAC AND WINDOWS

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FORMAT HARD DRIVE FOR USE ON MAC AND WINDOWS

I'm going to start working on scanning a lot of old family photos and getting them put on an external hard drive for my parents. I'd also like to eventually put old VHS family home movies on the hard drive as well. However, I'm not sure what to do about the hard drive. I know if I format it to be compatible with my Mac it probably won't be compatible with their PC. I read about the FAT32 option but I saw something about a file not working if it's over 4 GB in size. I'm thinking maybe some of those home movies will be larger than 4GB. I also saw an exFAT option. If I go with that will I be able to scan the photos on my Mac, get the home videos converted and put it all on the hard drive will all of it be visible and usable on their Windows PC?

Thanks for your help!

Posted on Jun 23, 2014 12:56 PM

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Answer 1

Kappy

Level 10

362,023 points

Jun 23, 2014 1:04 PM in response to matahari_1946

You can use the ExFAT option, but I recommend you format the drive on a PC rather than on the Mac. For best compatibility, however, I'd suggest installing a third-party utility on the Mac to enable writing to NTFS formatted drives. Use Paragon's NTFS 11.2.443.

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Answer 2

Jun 23, 2014 1:13 PM in response to Kappy

Thanks, I'll look into that. Just so I'm clear (I'm definitely not an expert)....if I install the NTFS utility on my Mac, do I still choose the exFat option or is there something different I need to go with NTFS? If I use the Paragon NTFS utility, do I still need to format the hard drive on the PC?

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Answer 3

Kappy

Level 10

362,023 points

Jun 23, 2014 1:18 PM in response to matahari_1946

No. The NTFS utility will enable you to both read and write NTFS disks, so you can also format them NTFS. You do not need to use the PC.

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Answer 4

Melophage

Level 5

7,213 points

Jun 23, 2014 2:00 PM in response to matahari_1946

matahari_1946,

if you’re not yet backing up your Mac’s internal hard disk, I’d recommend first that you purchase an external hard drive for yourself for exclusive use as a Time Machine backup destination; that way, in case of a disk problem, you won’t permanently lose all of your scanned photos and imported movies.

A 4 GB file limit does apply to FAT32 filesystems. If their version of Windows allows, the external disk which will hold those photos and videos should be formatted as NTFS from their PC, so that they can watch video files over 4 GB. (It’s unlikely that an individual photo file would be over 4 GB.) However, OS X doesn’t come out of the box with NTFS support. The exFAT filesystem is able to hold files over 4 GB, and it is supported by Mac OS X 10.6.5 and newer, but it’s optimized for flash drives; it’s more “fragile” on hard disks than other filesystems are. As a workaround, you could format a flash drive to have exFAT, copy videos over 4 GB onto the flash drive, and then use your parents’ PC to copy the videos from the flash drive to their NTFS external disk. Other alternatives would be to look for third-party software for OS X which supports reading from and writing to NTFS disks, or third-party software for Windows which supports reading from and writing to journaled HFS+ (the default OS X filesystem) disks.

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