Your Mac will see and read your Elements NTFS drive.Īnd that means you can copy off files and work on them on your Mac.īut when you’re ready to put documents onto your Elements drive. Your Western Digital Elements external drive is in a format called NTFS.
#Wd elements reformat for mac on windows Pc
Using Your Elements External Hard Disk On Your Mac And A PC.How Can You Use Your Elements Storage Device Without Reformatting?.How Do You Format Your WD Elements For Mac?.Can You Format Your WD Elements For Mac?.Plugging In Your WD Elements Cable Into Your Mac.Why Is Your WD Element Drive Read Only.
#Wd elements reformat for mac on windows windows
It’s possible, but tricky, to change the size of a partition later on in Windows and macOS we recommend backing up the data on your drive before attempting the task, since it’s possible to wipe your drive doing this. Make sure to leave plenty of room for future backups on both partitions. Now your computer will see your single drive as multiple, smaller drives. First, partition the drive using Disk Utility with macOS, and (using our walkthrough below) format one part as HFS+ and the other as FAT32 then, plug the drive into Windows and reformat the FAT32 portion as NTFS.
If you want to use a single external hard drive to back up both File History and Time Machine, you can partition it so that some of the drive is NTFS and some is HFS+.exFAT works on both macOS and Windows, and it doesn’t have the file size limit that FAT32 does, so you’ll be able to back up movies and other large files. If you need to transfer files larger than 4 GB between Mac and Windows computers, exFAT (extended File Allocation Table) is the best option, although it doesn’t work with File History or Time Machine.Unfortunately, it isn’t any good for storing movies and other large files: FAT32 has a size limit of 4 GB per file, so your files have to be small. FAT32 was introduced in Windows 95 in 1997, but it remains useful because nearly every system can use it. FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32) is an older file system that both Windows machines and Macs still support.Like NTFS, the HFS+ file system has file and partition size limits that are much bigger and more suitable for modern use than those of FAT32. A drive formatted this way will not mount on a Windows computer without additional software. If you plan to use your drive for Time Machine backups on a Mac, and you use only macOS, use HFS+ (Hierarchical File System Plus, or macOS Extended).Many backup archives and video files are larger than 4 GB. NTFS has huge file and partition size limits that you won’t hit that makes it a better choice than FAT32, which has a 4 GB size limit per file. macOS and Linux, however, can only read files stored on such a drive they cannot write to an NTFS-formatted drive. NTFS is native to Windows, and most hard drives are preformatted for this file system.