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1. #Read seagate external harddrive fprated for mac in windows mac os
2. #Read seagate external harddrive fprated for mac in windows drivers
3. #Read seagate external harddrive fprated for mac in windows software

So on a Windows PC, you can read and write to a FAT formatted drive. The one simple benefit of the FAT format today is that it can be read from and written to by either of the operating systems discussed here. Most forms of removable media (memory cards for digital cameras, flash drives, etc) use the FAT format, as the capacity of most of these devices is significantly smaller than hard drives, and the more robust formats of the two predominant operating systems is not required. (For more information on FAT formats check out ) FAT has several forms and variations, the most recent of which is FAT32. There is yet a third drive format that CAN be used across these two operating systems without the need for special third party drivers.

#Read seagate external harddrive fprated for mac in windows software

The Mac, on the other hand, can read an NTFS formatted drive - it just can’t write to it (again, unless you use a third party software driver).

#Read seagate external harddrive fprated for mac in windows drivers

(I should note here that there are several third party software drivers on the market that will allow either OS to read and write the other’s formats - but not all functionality is supported, and they both reduce performance when going through such an application) While Windows can read and write to NTFS formatted drives, it can neither write nor read to a drive that has been formatted HFS+.

Interoperability - Now for the confusing part: what drive formats work with what OSs. For a hard drive to be used with Time Machine (Mac OS X 10.5 and later), the drive must be formatted in HFS+ Journaled (Journaled adds an extra element to the standard HFS+ format). This is the required format for a bootable Mac hard drive. This format was optimized to minimize the amount of drive storage space used for a single file (the previous version used sectors loosely, leading to rapidly lost drive space).

#Read seagate external harddrive fprated for mac in windows mac os

Mac - Since Mac OS 8.1, the Mac has been using a format called HFS+ - also known as Mac OS Extended format. If you have a Windows PC (NT on, including Windows 7), then your system drive is most likely formatted in the NTFS format. This is the format that is used with all current versions of Windows. Windows - With the advent of Windows NT, Microsoft moved their optimized drive format to something called NTFS (New Technology File System). One is for Windows, one is for Mac, and one crosses the two (but with its own limitations).

NTFS, HFS+, FAT - These are the primary formats that are in use today by PC users. So I thought I’d present a short primer on the formats hard drives use with and between these two primary operating systems. I get this question about once a year from my father-in-law. When you work for a storage solutions company you get a lot of questions from people about hard drive formats - especially about which formats are compatible across the most common operating system platforms, Windows and Mac.