Choose the USB drive to be formatted on the left and click the Erase button on the top.Enter Disk Utility in the search box and launch Disk Utility.Connect the USB drive that you want to format.Method To Format USB Drives for Mac & PC Compatibility Format USB Drives to ExFAT on Mac The following article will introduce how to format USB drives to ExFAT for two different systems so that the USB drives can be shared by mac and windows. So if you want to share a USB drive between Mac and Windows, a relatively simple method is to change the format of the USB drive to ExFAT. Except for older versions of Windows and Mac, basically the later Windows and Mac can support this format.

There is no file and partition size limitation of FAT32. The most commonly used file format in USB drives is FAT32, which can be used directly by Windows and Mac OS X, but FAT32 is an older file system, so there are more restrictions on the size of a single file.ĮxFAT is an advanced version of FAT32. NTFS is the native file system of Windows, but Mac OS X has limited support for NTFS, which can only be read but not written. Many users feel that the reason why the USB drive does not work on both Windows system and Mac is that the file formats used by the Windows and Mac systems are different, which cause the difficulty of data interoperability.Īmong the four commonly used formats for USB drives, the native file system of Mac OS X uses HFS+, but Windows does not support HFS+. In fact, what many people don’t know is that Macs can share USB drives with Windows! In this article, we wil discuss about the methods to format USB drives for Mac & PC compatibility. Summary : Many users reported that the purchased flash drive can be used smoothly in Windows system, but cannot be used on Macs.

How to format usb drive for mac