To make any portable hard drive such as Seagate, Western Digital, etc to work with both Mac and Windows computer, we need to format it to a proper file system.
Which file system is compatible with Mac and Windows? So, to make a portable hard drive work well on both Mac and PC, we need to find out proper file systems that are compatible with those 2 platforms and format your hard drive into any of these file systems. Windows uses NTFS and FAT32 while Mac uses HFS and they’re incompatible with each other. However, it’s not just a case of formatting if you want to use your hard drive on both Mac and PC when these 2 platforms use different file systems. And only after formatted, your computer can work normally.
Without this step, your computer will have no idea where to write or read. Usually, when we use a new hard drive for the first time, no matter it's portable or non-portable, it can not be directly put into use for it has to be initialized and formatted first, like giving it fresh new birth. How to format portable hard drive for Mac and PC?
