- HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC FOR MAC
- HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC INSTALL
- HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC FULL
- HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC WINDOWS 10
- HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC PRO
In the Disk Management app, right-click on the drive and select New Simple Volume.Ĭlick the Next button until you get to the Format Partition window and choose exFAT under File System (you can also change the name of the drive under Volume label if you wish). To do so, connect the Passport to your PC, enter the Windows 8 Start menu and choose Disk Management.
HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC FOR MAC
To Windows 8 and Earlier The external drive for Mac to Windows 8 transition makes use of Windows built-in Disk Management software rather than the macOS Disk Utility, but youll still want to format your WD Passport as an exFAT drive. Once the formatting is complete and you get a message that says Operation successful, click Done.
Now, click the Partition button at the top of the Disk Utility and click Format.Ĭhoose exFAT from the drop-down menu that appears and click Apply to format the drive, which will take a few minutes. Here, youll usually see two listings of partitions available on the drive select the listing that is furthest left.Ĭlick the Disk Utilitys Erase button assign the drive a name in the Name field then hit Erase, and click Done when the erasing process is complete. To start formatting, connect your WD Passport to your Mac then open Mac HD and click Applications, Utilities and Disk Utility.įrom the Disk Utility window, select the Passport hard drive.
HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC WINDOWS 10
Use Wd Passport Windows 10 If YouveĮxternal Drive for Mac to Windows 10 If youve got a WD external drive for Mac platforms and you want it to work on a Windows 10 PC, exFAT format is your best bet. Hard drives formatted to exFAT or FAT32 can read and write data on both Mac and PC operating systems, though FAT32 is limited to a 4-gigabyte-per-file size limit.įormatting your drive will erase all its data, so be sure to back it up before making the change. However, by formatting your My Passport differently, you can ensure compatibility in a variety of different ways. NTFS-formatted drives work with Windows computers, and HFS drives work with Mac.
HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC INSTALL
When it comes to cross-platform flexibility, youve got a few options for crossing the Mac and PC streams.Ībout eFAT and FAT32 Heres something your My Passport for Mac Quick Install Guide might not tell you: Hard drives usually come formatted in two different ways, one catering to Windows and one catering to Mac.
HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC PRO
I have two of the Seagate 5TB with no issues (I reformatted for Mac).īTW, Im a fan of the WD 20TB My Book Duo, which Ive used as mirrored 10TB with my iMac Pro for the past two years with no problems.īut with more than 262.5 million PCs shipped in 2017, according to data from Statista, theres a good chance your Passport Studio will need to play nicely with a Windows computer, too. The only place I can find the WD at the moment is at BH for 160. Ive bought a handful of the 4TB drives (Windows and Mac) in the last year or so - silver is generally the color on sale at Best Buy - reformatting as NTFS to maintain cross-platform compatibility. However the same rules apply, only PCs with this software will see drives formatted for Macs.They continue to sell the older design drives (USB A to Micro B) as well.
HOW TO USE WD FOR MAC FULL
Otherwise, you can have a drive as NTFS to allow to work on any PC and then install on your Mac a free app from the Apple website called NTFS-3G, which allows your Mac to fully use (read and write) to NTFS and also do automatic backups with no restrictions on both systems, but since it is done using the NTFS-3G software, this configuration will only work on YOUR Mac and the others will only read from the drive (But they won’t be able to add files).Īlso, you can have the drive as HFS+ to allow you to use it on any Mac and then install on Windows a program called HFSExplorer (Free), which allows you to read (see and copy out) drives formatted for Mac (But not write, so you can’t add files) or you can install MacDrive (NOT free), which is a software able to allow full HFS+ integration (Read and write) on a PC, meaning that it is the exact opposite to NTFS-3G. You can format a drive as FAT32, which would allow it to work on BOTH Windows and Mac, but it won’t do automatic backups, won’t take files larger than 4GB and will have a high risk of data corruption