Format a Disk to Use on Both Mac and PC for Solving Compatible and Transferring Problem

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Have you ever encountered that when you want to transfer files between Mac and PC with hard disc or a flash drive which cannot well worked on one side? For the two different system, how to format a disk to use on both Mac and PC for this compatible and transferring problem will simply explored in this article.

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You may be driven into crazy for you can’t both use a hard disk or a flash drive on Mac or PC, which you may have one at your office ,one at your home. If you want to continue your job at home while there are a plenty of files need to be transferred into another computer, what will you do ? Actually, it’s not uncommon to need an external drive (hard drive or USK stick ) that works on both Mac and Wind computers, for the above circumstance, you will definitely need to constantly transfer files from one system to another.

Here you can create one disk that can be used by both operation systems in less than a minute.

Step 1. Connect the disk and open Disk Utility

Connect the hard drive or USK drive to your Mac and then open the Disk Utility app, whick you can find under “Applications” -> “Ultities” -> “Disk Utility”. If you can’t find it , just click your Launchpad to locate this app.

Step 2. Select a dick to format

Then run this app to choose the disk that you want to format for both Mac and PC from the left column.

Step 3. Choose the format

Open the “Erase” tab. Form the “Format” drop-down menu, choose “MS-DOS(FAT)”, better known as FAT32.

Step 4. Choose a name for the disc

After you choose the format, you’ll see a box to enter the name of the disk. Choose any name with a maximum of 11 characters (don’t worry, it can be changed later).

Step 5. Erase and format

Click on “Erase” and confirm the operation in the next pop-up window.

Attention:

If you choose “Erase”, this will delete all data on the disk. If there are some important documents on there that you want to keep , copy them before this step on your Mac or on another external drive first.

Done! You can use this disk for both Mac and windows now.

Why choose HD formatted in FAT32, what problems you may have?

FAT32 is the only format that both OS X and Windows can read and write without the use of third-party apps. Here are some things you need to know before using this FAT32 format disk:

1. The largest supported file size is no more than 4GB.

2. It doesn’t let you set access permissions to files, so the secure problem may not be ensured compared to NTFS format.

3. For the space management. In practice, for the same total size, you can put fewer files on a FAT32 formatted disk compared to a NTFS formatted disk.

If you think this format disk thing is very complex and not as convenient as you thought, then you can depent on some cloud-based solutions like Dropbox , which don’t have compatibility issues, although are sometimes limited in space.

So is there any way can solve both the compatibility problem and transfer files without size limits?

Here you can try this Pavtube HD Video Converter for Mac (Windows Version) to break the file limit while get the compatible file you want.

It is especially for dealing with the video files. If you have 5 or 10 GB videos, then you have to bring it home to make some edits, than you can try this converter. Make your videos into the compatible format like MP4 for both Mac and Win, while quality drop will almost can’t be noticed.

There are a plenty of presets for users to choose , if you want to load them into FCP on Mac at your home, then you can choose “ProRes 422” as your output format. This will be especially convenient for some film editor, videographers, etc.

Simple steps here to start:

Step 1. Launch this Video Converter on your computer.

Step 2. Load your videos by clicking “File” -> “Add Video/Audio”.

Step 3. Choose proper format as your output format.

Step 4. Click “Convert” to start your conversion.

After that, you can have your converted files with compatible format for both Mac and PC. If you want to downscale your files, you can lower your Bit rate to realize that. But pay attention to the balance between Bit rate and Frame rate or there will be some problems happen.