Why Need to Format External Hard Drive for Mac and PC. To put it simply, if you want to share external hard drive between Mac and PC, you need to format an external hard drive for Mac and PC. Currently, hard drives for Windows PC are always formatted with NTFS, while hard disks for Mac are formatted with HFS+. But you can open HFSExplorer, read a Mac-formatted drive, and copy the files to your Windows PC without paying a dime. It can also mount Mac.dmg disk images to get at the files inside them. This application’s read-only nature isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Format external drives to Mac OS Extended before using with Aperture Tips on preparing a new external hard drive for use with Aperture. You may wish to use an external FireWire or USB hard drive to store your Aperture Library, referenced images, or Vaults.
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HFS+ is one of the primary file systems of macOS. If you work on Windows computer and need to read or write files from HDD, SSD or flash drive formatted under macOS, you need HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software.
Stable Operation
Fail-safe operability across compatible hardware and software systems for both general-purpose and specialized applications
Data Safety
Protection of data integrity and prevention of accidental data corruption and possible loss
Guaranteed Performance
Steady throughput and balanced goodput with effective flow control, reduced overheads, and congestion avoidance
Efficient Use
Thrifty usage of processor, memory, and disk resources
Native look and feel
PC Advisor MagazineIt simply works out of the box too – previously inaccessible drives suddenly show up like any other, and you can now easily transfer data to and from a Mac using an external HFS+ formatted drive as an intermediary. There’s no performance penalty either – we happily transferred multi-gigabyte files via a USB 2 connection at around 40MB/s, for example.
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MacBreaker,Paragon HFS+ runs in the background and automatically starts on bootup, so accessing your Mac drives will feel exactly like accessing normal Windows drives.
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MakeUseOf,Paragon HFS+ does cost $20, but it also offers a 10-day free trial. If you just need to recover files from a drive, 10 days is plenty of time to install this file system driver, copy your files over, and uninstall it. If you want to use Mac drives on Windows on an ongoing basis, paying $20 so you can use the drive properly is a pretty good deal. As a bonus, Paragon HFS+ doesn’t require you have the insecure Java installed.
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How it Works
Install
Download and install the HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software
Use
Your drive will show up in Explorer
- Straightforward UI for working with HFS+ partitions as easily as native volumes
- Easy to navigate all features from a single application menu
- Check the integrity of HFS+ partitions to fix errors and view status report
- Quickly access HFS + partitions from the Windows taskbar
Features
Supported Operating Systems |
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Supported File Systems |
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Write Access | When a volume is mounted in write mode, you can do everything with files and folders it contains: read, edit, delete, rename, create new. |
Automount | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software mounts supported volumes automatically at startup, so you don’t need to bother about it each time you restart the operating system or power your computer on. However, this feature can be disabled at any moment in the program interface. |
Internationalization | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software supports all alphabets supported by your operating systems, including those that use non-Roman and non-Latin characters, so you will never face a problem of not getting access to file names on volumes mounted in non-native OS. |
Support for journaling | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software supports native HFS+ journaling, thus ensuring that in case of any failure the disk file system is not irreversibly corrupted and can be put back on track easily. |
Compatible with Apple Boot Camp | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software is fully compatible with Apple Boot Camp software and provides direct read and write access to Mac partitions from Windows installed on a Boot Camp. |
Compatible with 3rd party software | HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software is compatible with popular virtualization and encryption applications including VMware Fusion and Workstation, Parallels Desktop, TrueCrypt and its forks. |
Need APFS support for Windows 10?
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- Full support of Windows 10, 8/8.1, 7 SP1
- Availability to read and write data on APFS-formatted disks
- Automount
Frequently Asked Questions
Due to the specifics of Windows 8 or Windows 10 Fast Startup feature, we highly recommend that you disable it before installing the driver to avoid possible file system corruption. For more details, please refer to the Microsoft Knowledge Base ››
Can I try the product for free before buying? | |
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What versions of the HFS file system are supported? | |
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Is APFS supported? | |
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Is BootCamp supported? | |
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Is Core Storage supported? | |
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How many times can I re-activate my license? | |
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It doesn’t work! My HFS+ drive is not recognized in Windows, even after installing HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software | |
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The product doesn’t run on Windows Server 2012 R2. | |
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Can I open my Time Machine backup using HFS+ for Windows? | |
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I frequently work with NTFS, HFS+, APFS-formatted partitions on my Mac and Windows PC. Can I get a discount, if I buy all drivers at once? | |
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Ensure multi-platform access - activate required file system drivers based on your IT park, regardless of OS, in any proportion.
Resources
Current Version | Download Paragon HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software |
Product Documentation | Download HFS+ for Windows by Paragon Software One Pager |
Product Tour | View Product Tour |
Need help? | Contact Support or file a support ticket |
Paragon Technology Center
Want to learn more about the technology behind Microsoft NTFS for Mac by Paragon Software? Check out the Paragon Technology Portal!
So you’re using Disk Utility to partition your new hard drive when you’re presented with a choice of potential file systems. The list is longer than you’d think, with terms like “APFS (Case-sensitive)” and “Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)” to choose from.
What does all this mean, and which should you choose? Basically there are three main options:
RELATED:What’s New in macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Available Now
- APFS, or “Apple File System,” is one of the new features in macOS High Sierra. It’s optimized for solid state drives (SSDs) and other all-flash storage devices, though it will also work on mechanical and hybrid drives.
- Mac OS Extended, also known as HFS Plus or HFS+, is the file system used on all Macs from 1998 until now. On macOS High Sierra, it’s used on all mechanical and hybrid drives, and older versions of macOS used it by default for all drives.
- ExFAT is the best cross platform option, designed to work on Windows and macOS systems. Use this for an external drive that will plug into both kinds of computers.
Mac Extended Journaled
Choosing a file system is basically choosing between these three options. The other factors, like encryption and case sensitivity, aren’t something you should get too hung up on. Let’s dive into a bit more details about the top three choices below, and then explain a few of the sub-options.
APFS: Best for Solid State and Flash Drives
APFS, or Apple File System, is the default file system for solid state drives and flash memory in 2017’s macOS High Sierra. First released in 2016, it offers all sorts of benefits over Mac OS Extended, the previous default.
RELATED:APFS Explained: What You Need to Know About Apple’s New File System
For one thing, APFS is faster: copying and pasting a folder is basically instantaneous, because the file system basically points to the same data twice. And improvements to metadata mean it’s very quick to do things like determine how much space a folder is taking up on your drive. There are also a number of reliability improvements, making things like corrupted files a lot less common. There are a lot of upsides here. We’re just skimming the surface, so check out our article about everything you need to know about APFS for more information about the benefits of APFS.
So what’s the catch? Reverse compatibility. 2016’s macOS Sierra was the first operating system capable of reading and writing to APFS systems, meaning any Mac using an older operating system will not be able to write to APFS-formatted drives. If there’s an older Mac you need a drive to work with, APFS is a bad choice for that drive. And forget about reading an APFS drive from Windows: there aren’t even third-party tools out there for that yet.
APFS also isn’t compatible with Time Machine at this time, so you’ll have to format backup drives as Mac OS Extended.
Other than that, there’s probably no reason not to use APFS at this point, especially on solid state drives and flash memory.
Mac OS Extended: Best for Mechanical Drives, Or Drives Used With Older macOS Versions
Mac OS Extended was the default file system used by every Mac from 1998 until 2017, when APFS replaced it. To this day, it remains the default file system for mechanical and hybrid hard drives, both while installing macOS and while formatting external drives. This is in part because the benefits of APFS aren’t as clear on mechanical drives.
If you’ve got a mechanical hard drive, and you intend to use it only with Macs, it’s probably best to stick with Mac OS Extended. And any drive that needs to work with older Macs, running El Capitan or earlier, should absolutely be formatted with Mac OS Extended, because APFS is not compatible with those computers.
APFS also doesn’t work with Time Machine, so you should format any drive you want to use for backing up your Mac using Mac OS Extended.
ExFat: Best for External Drives Shard With Windows Computers
ExFat should basically only be used on drives that need to work with both Windows and macOS computers. The format dates back to 2006, and was made by Microsoft to provide some of the cross-platform compatibility of the older FAT32 format without the file and partition size limitations. It’s not a particularly optimized file format—it’s far more vulnerable to file fragmentation than APFS or Mac OS Extended, for one thing, and metadata and other features used by macOS aren’t present.
But formatting a drive with ExFAT offers one huge advantage: both Windows and macOS computers and both read and write to this format. Sure, you could read a Mac formatted drive on Windows or read a Windows formatted drive on a Mac, but both solutions either cost money or are unstable. So despite the disadvantages, ExFAT is your best option for cross-platform hard drives.
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Case Sensitive: Avoid Unless You Know Why You Want It
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APFS and Mac OS Extended both offer a “Case Sensitive” option, but macOS does not use this setting by default. And unless you really know what you’re doing, and have a specific reason for wanting it, you shouldn’t use case sensitivity when formatting a drive.
To be clear, you can use capital letters in file names either way. Case Sensitivity mostly determines whether the file system sees capital letters as different. By default, it doesn’t, which is why you can’t have a file called “Fun.txt” and “fun.txt” in the same folder on a Mac. The file system sees the file names as identical, even if they look different to you.
Macs used case sensitivity at the file system by default in the 90s, but this changed around the time of Mac OS X’s launch. UNIX-based systems are generally case sensitive and Mac OS X was the first Mac operating system based on the UNIX standard, so this is a little unusual. Presumably, a case-sensitive file system was just seen as less user-friendly.
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![Format Format](/uploads/1/2/6/5/126568159/530289337.png)
Today, enabling case sensitivity could break some Mac apps that expect a case-insensitive file system.
Our recommendation is to avoid case sensitivity for both APFS and Mac OS Extended unless you have a specific reason for wanting it. There’s not many benefits to turning it on, but all kinds of things might break, and dragging files from one to the other might mean data loss.
Encryption Protects Your Files, But Might Affect Performance
We’ve told you how to encrypt your macOS hard drives, but the fastest way to get this done is enabling encryption when you first format the drive. Both APFS and Mac OS Extended offer an Encrypted option, and if security is a concern, it’s a good idea to use this on external drives.
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The main downside is that forgetting the encryption key means losing access to your files. Do not encrypt a drive unless you can remember the key, or unless you have somewhere secure to store it.
The other potential downside to encryption is performance. Reading and writing will be slower on an encrypted drive, but we think it’s generally worth it—especially on portable Macs, like laptops.
Other Options: MS-DOS (FAT) and Windows NT
Eagle-eyed observers will notice a few more options than what I’ve outlined above. Here’s a quick summary of those.
- MS-DOS (FAT) is an ancient reverse-compatible file format, a precursor to FAT32. Only use this if you absolutely need compatibility with Windows versions older than XP SP2. You almost certainly do not.
- Windows NT Filesystem might be offered depending on your setup. This is the main type of drive used by Windows systems, and it’s probably a better idea to create such partitions on a Windows system.
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We’ve already told you the difference between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS, so check that list for more detail about these and other options.
Photo credit: Patrick Lindenberg, Brian Blum, Tinh tế Photo, Telaneo
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