My daughter has a MAC laptop. Her office laptop is an HP PC. She often needs to transfer videos between both devices. I want to buy her an HDD that will allow this transfer and storage. Is it possible? Thank you
format it exFAT File System and it can be used with a PC and Mac
Well, most external hard drives are designed to work for Windows computers. Windows was mainly optimized for NTFS (New Technology file system) format, on the other hand, APFS was created for the Mac OS. NTFS is not compatible with Mac and similarly, APFS does not get along with Windows. So if you’re trying to connect an external hard drive to a Mac, you might have to format the drive before you can use it.
Further, I suggest you to check the below link that explains all the methods to format your external drive for mac without any data loss:
Hope it helps!
FAT32 and exFAT formatted hard drives are plug-and-play on both Windows and Mac computers, allowing you to transfer and edit files directly across different systems.
The only difference is that you cannot store files larger than 4GB on a FAT32 drive due to file system limitations. Since your daughter frequently needs to transfer large video files, she might run into issues with this format. Therefore, exFAT is the most suitable option.
[You might want to learn this - How to Format an External Hard Drive for Mac and Windows ]
If the HDD you purchased is originally in NTFS format (the default for Windows), you can simply reformat it to exFAT.
By default, Mac can only read NTFS drives but cannot write to them. Specifically, you cannot copy new files from a Mac to an NTFS external hard drive, nor can you directly edit the files already stored on it. To get full read and write access, you will need to use a third-party NTFS for Mac driver, which allows you to bypass the step of formatting the drive.
