Menu
Professional Photographers and videographers have their hands laid upon various digital devices. Usually, their arsenal includes a cutting-edge Windows 10 desktop, the latest and the magnificent MacBook Pro, DSLR & SD-Cards of-course and the trusted & loved external drives such as the WD My Passport. The role of the WD My Passport drive is crucial since the individual will leverage the portable media to safely store their collection of pictures, videos, audio, and docs. But despite the best of the best device specifications; there remains one small glitch to rectify. We know, Macs and Windows have their native file systems such as the new APFS or HFS and the NTFS. A WD My Passport formatted with Mac file system will be a dud on the Windows and vice-versa.
To share a USB drive between a Mac and a Windows PC, there are two disk formats to choose from: exFAT and FAT32. The other formats -- Microsoft's NTFS. How to Format a WD hard drive to exFAT or FAT32 File System. (Windows and Mac). The easiest way to format the drive to FAT32 or ExFAT is by using macOS's built-in.
Thankfully, MS-DOS FAT32 and ex-FAT formats have survived to date, and these are the file system to make your WD My Passport work with a Mac and a Windows PC simultaneously. In the next 5 minutes read, you will master yourself in formatting a WD My Passport safely and in a manner best suited for sharing your digital files between a macOS and Windows OS. To format a Western Digital My Passport external hard drive in ex-FAT or FAT32 format, you can bank on built-in applications of Mac & PC. However, while doing this, there are things you have to keep in mind and follow the correct steps. Here you will get to know about the process to format your “My passport” portable drive in FAT32 and ex-FAT file system in both Windows and Mac platforms. In Windows Platform: 1.
Connect your Western Digital My Passport hard drive to your Windows PC through the USB cable. Wait till the Windows detects the external hard drive and configure it as an expansion drive automatically. Now, click the Start button and select ‘This PC’. A new Windows Explorer window opens, on the left side of the screen; you will see a list of installed drives and their drive letters. Locate the icon assigned to Western Digital My Passport drive and Right-click the connected drive icon and click ‘Format’ in the pop-up menu. Select the ‘File System’ from the drop-down list, which is available in the format expansion and choose either ‘ex-FAT’ or ‘FAT32’. Enter a relevant name in the ‘Volume Label’ field.
This name will represent your drive when you connect it with Windows Explorer or Mac and will be mentioned above the drive letter for the My Passport drive. Therefore, enter a descriptive name.
Now, again select a ‘Quick Format’ option, then click ‘Start’ option, wait for a few minutes to get your drive reformatted with the FAT32 file system, so that you can use it. After successful formatting, you can directly save or move files to it like any other external hard drive. In macOS / OS X Platform. Connect your Western Digital My Passport drive to Mac computer, and let the OS detect and mount the drive for use. Now, a new hard drive icon will appear on the desktop. On macOS Dock, select Finder.
When the Finder window opens, on the menu bar, select ‘Go’ and then ‘Utilities.’ After that, you will be able to see /Applications/Utilities folder in Finder. From the Utilities folder window, select ‘Disk Utility’ application. When the Disk Utility opens, choose the Western Digital hard drive icon from the sidebar. Click ‘Erase’ on the Disk Utility file menu. Now, the Erase dialogue window appears, here select the ‘Volume Format’ drop-down list and choose ‘MS-DOS (FAT)’ or ex-FAT File System.’ Note: ex-FAT is a better choice for formatting WD My Passport on Mac.
Now, click the ‘Erase,’ button and wait a few minutes and let the macOS erase data on the drive and reformat it by FAT32 or ex-FAT format. Once formatting is done, you can use the drive in macOS or OS X as a regular hard drive. Window’s Disk Management and Mac’s Disk Utility applications are secure platforms to erase your WD My Passport easily. You don’t require any third-party software to format your WD My Passport with FAT or ex-FAT. Caution: Avoid Formatting your WD My Passport without Backup We can’t rule out the possibilities of human errors resulting in the accidental formatting of the WD My Passport external drive. A silly man-made mistake will permanently remove all of the contained pictures, videos, audio files, and docs instantly from the WD My Passport.
Hence, fasten your seat-belts and backup your WD My Passport before erasing. If you have already joined the data loss club unwillingly, then try running D-I-Y applications to recover data from. Tips for Effective Formatting. Format your Western Digital My Passport external hard drive to FAT32 or ex-FAT format so to transfer the data between a Mac and Windows system conveniently. There are specific third-party systems, like Digital Camcorders, and Sony PlayStation 3, which need the drives to be formatted in either FAT32 or ex-FAT format to perform read from and write operation. Check it before selecting a file format.
Due to some limitations FAT32 format is not useful for every type of user, and also affects both Mac’s and PC’s performances. Therefore, it is better to choose ex-FAT instead.
Ex-FAT supports maximum volume size up to 128 PiB, and its supported maximum file size is 128 PiB. Like FAT32, ex-FAT is not a very commonly used file system, due to which its support may vary among third-party devices. The corruption chances of the external drive increases, if it is used on both Mac and PC systems regularly. Therefore, it is better to take backup of your important photos and videos before sharing them between both the computers.
You can format your external hard drive from either the PC or Mac. Just keep in mind if you want to use your drive also for OS X's Time Machine backups, we advise you to format your drive through Mac because there is an additional step to make drive compatible with “Time Machine Backups”. And you can only do this with exFAT as with FAT32 Mac OS X's Time Machine backup won't work. FAT32 or exFAT? You can format your external hard drive in both – exFAT and FAT32.
They both will work just fine. Mac and PC can read and write on both.
However, each of these filesystems has their own pros and cons. FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit, but exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB, that's more than you will ever need.
If you have to work with large video clips, games or any other kind of massive files, FAT32 may not be the best choice. Many still choose FAT32 over exFAT despite its slower performance, as it's also compatible with Linux Os and is supported on many consoles. Once you have done with formatting, your external hard drive will be able to write and read files from both a PC and Mac. The resulting FAT32 file system will be compatible with all versions of Mac OS X, and Windows including back to 95. This is one of the most widely recognized file system formats. FAT32 – a file system normally used on USB disks.
exFAT – a newer file system optimized for flash devices and has improved performance overFAT32 Why I can't use NTFS on Mac? The default file system for Windows is NTFS (New Technology File System). Macs that run Snow Leopard or Lion can read data from drives that are formatted as NTFS. However, they can't write.
To make your Mac compatible writing on NTFS you have to get and install a third-party driver. So in the end, it's possible to make your NTFS external hard drive compatible with Mac. But we advise to just format it to “FAT” file system as it's less time consuming and easier. Windows 7 can't read nor write files to external drives that are formatted as HFS. To do so you also have to install third-party like.
How to format an External Drive in Windows 1) Connect the drive to your Windows PC. 2) Open Disk Management. 3) Right click on unallocated or any other disk partition and select “ New Simple Volume” 4) Choose your desired size 5) Assign your external hard drive with any letter. 6) Choose exFAT as the file system.
7) Follow the instructions and at the end click “ Finish“ How to Format an External Drive in OS X 1) Connect your external hard drive to the Mac. 2) Open Disk Utility. You can do this quickly by pressing CMD and the spacebar at the same time. Then type in “Disk Utility”. 3) Select the drive you want to format. 4) Click the Partition tab. 6) Change the Partition Layout from Current to 1 Partition.
7) Click Options, Select Master Boot Record, and click OK. 8) Name the hard drive with a name of your choice.
9) Click the Format drop-down menu. 10) Select exFAT or MS-DOS FAT(FAT32). 11) At last press Apply, then click on Partition. WD My Book would be best for desktop, Seagate Backup Plus Slim would be one of the best portable hard drives. Both are all-around decent drives and will do fine for any backup, pictures included. As for cross-platform encryption, if you intend to use the same drive on both Mac and Windows, the best option would be using a cross-platform compatible encryption tool, like, while formatting the drive in exFAT to avoid compatibility issues. This is because Windows won’t recognize Mac’s native encryption and vice versa.
VeraCrypt is well-renowned, so it should function well without any problems, just be prepared to learn how to use the tool. Try testing this setup with just a couple files before you perform entire backups.