If you plan to use an external hard drive (HDD), which costs less than an external solid-state drive (SSD) for more storage capacity but has the downside of slower transfer times and a far less durable design, you should use HFS+ (Hierarchical File System Plus, also called macOS Extended Journaled). Typically, if an external drive is physically larger than a deck or cards or has more than 2 TB of storage, it’s an HDD.macOS and Linux computers, 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.
#How to format wd elements for mac and pc portable
If you buy an external drive-such as one of our recommended portable or desktop hard drives, portable solid-state drives, or USB 3.0 flash drives-you may need to reformat it to work with your operating system of choice, since different operating systems use different file systems to process data.Īlthough it’s true that any drive is compatible with both Windows and macOS once it’s formatted properly, most drives come preformatted for Windows out of the box.