Specific third-party systems, like Digital Camcorders and Sony PlayStation, need the drives to be formatted in either FAT32 or ex-FAT format to perform read and write operations.įormat your Western Digital My Passport external hard drive to FAT32 or ex-FAT format to transfer the data between a Mac and Windows system conveniently.Things you Should Know Before Formatting WD My Passport Stellar Data Recovery has a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can upgrade with confidence.

Check this before selecting a file format.

FAT32 supports a maximum volume of up to 8 Terabytes and a maximum file size of up to 4 Gigabytes.

Ex-FAT supports a maximum volume size of up to 1 Petabytesyte and maximum file size of 16 Exabytes.

Due to the limitation of FAT32, it might affect Mac’s and PC’s performance.

Therefore, it is better to choose ex-FAT instead.

Like FAT32, ex-FAT is not a commonly used file system, due to which its support may vary among third-party devices.

The corruption chances of the external drive increase if used on both Mac and PC systems regularly.

Disk Utility on Mac supports several file system formats: Apple File System (APFS): The file system used by macOS 10.13 or later. So, please back up the data before sharing it between the two computers. Right-click on the external drive's partition or unallocated space you want to format and choose New Simple Volume 4. Mac OS Extended: The file system used by macOS 10.12 or earlier. Follow the wizard to choose a volume size. How to format mac disk in windows 7 how to. MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT: File systems that are compatible with Windows. How to Format Hard Drive from Command Prompt To format a hard drive using cmd via Command Prompt, use the diskpart commands given below carefully.

Note - Both formatting solutions will erase hard drive data completely, so make sure that you have backed up all important data. This application’s read-only nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can also mount Mac.dmg disk images to get at the files inside them.