best way to format a drive for mac and pc

Best Way To Format A Drive And Pc Verification To Make

Use these steps to format external hard drives for both operating systems.

If you work solely on a Mac, but need to send files to someone working on a PC, your external hard drive needs to be set up for both operating systems.

Lets take a look at the different types of formats, and which are best for video production.

Hard drives set up for use on Windows machines only will often use NTFS, while Macs will use HFS.

That said, if you are using both a PC and Mac in the workflow, youll need to use a different format.

If you need to send them RAW files or an edited sequence, you will need to make sure the external hard drive is set up for both operating systems.

To do this, you will need to use either exFAT or FAT32 formats.

This will allow you to use the hard drive on both a Mac and PC.

A single high resolution file can easily go over 4 GB, so Fat32 may not the best format.

The maximum individual file size for exFAT is 16 EB.

EB, or exabyte, is 1 billion GB.

That said, if you are using smaller file sizes FAT32 can suffice.

This includes the way you name the drive and how you label it.

For instance, one project had several external drives, all of which were named after different Will Ferrell characters Mugatu, Megamind, Lord Business, and Ron Burgundy.

Another project used Tom Hanks characters Forrest and Woody.

Best Way To Format A Drive And Pc Verification To Make

Use checksum verification to make sure everything is copied correctly.

You can simply use some masking tape or gaff tape, and then write the name of the drive.

You can also use hard drive labels, which are the awesome stickers featured above.

You easily put them on your external drive to keep track of them.

I recently had Kermit the Frog and Optimus Prime hard drives.

You never know when you will need that footage from a three-year-old project.

Best Way To Format A Drive For Mac And Pc