Want to use one external drive for both your Windows PC and your Mac? One hurdle you'll face is that, by default, these platforms use different filesystems. Windows uses NTFS and Mac OS uses HFS and they're incompatible with each other. However, you can format the drive to work with both Windows and Mac by using the exFAT filesystem. Here's how.

In this guide we're using exFAT instead of FAT32, another filesystem that both Windows and Mac can read and write to, because FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit whereas exFAT can work with files as large as 16EB (exabytes). exFAT also performs better than FAT32.

Jul 20, 2015  This is a step by step instructions on installing Windows 10. For a clean install you might need to disable UEFI Download Windows 10 Bu. In this guide, we'll show you the steps to properly format a new hard drive using Disk Management on Windows 10.

You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. However, if you want to use part of the drive for OS X's Time Machine backups, you should do this from the Mac, since there's an extra step to make the drive compatible for Time Machine.

How to Format an External Drive in OS X

1. Connect the drive to the Mac.

2. Open Disk Utility. The easiest way to do that is hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in Disk Utility to find the program.

3. Select the drive you want to format.

4. Click Erase.

If you don't plan on using the drive for Time Machine, skip steps 5 to 11 below and continue with step 12.

5. Give the drive a descriptive name and leave the default settings: OS X Extended format and GUID partition map. These will format the drive in OS X's HFS+ filetype so it will be compatible with Time Machine.

6. Click Erase and OS X will format the drive.

7. With the drive selected in Disk Utility, click Partition.

8. Enter the amount of space you want to set aside for Time Machine. In this example, we're shrinking the Time Machine partition to 128 GB instead of allowing Time Machine to take up the whole drive.

9. Click Apply.

10. Select the new untitled partition so we can format it as exFAT for use with both Mac and Windows.

11. Click Erase.

12. Give the partition a name and select exFAT for the format.

13. Click Erase Stago compact loading mode. to finish.

Your exFAT-formatted drive or partition can now be used for both Windows and Mac. Note that using a drive frequently between Windows and Mac could increase the chances of file corruption, so make sure you have backups of the files on the shared drive and be extra careful about safely ejecting the drive before disconnecting it from your computer.

How to Format an External Drive in Windows

The instructions below are for Windows 10, but other versions of Windows from Windows 7 and up can also format an external drive as exFAT for use with Mac as well.

1. Connect the drive to your Windows PC.

2. Open the Disk Management tool. You can do that by typing 'disk format' or 'disk management' in Windows search or going to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Create and format hard disk partitions.

3. Right-click on the external drive's partition or unallocated space you want to format and choose New Simple Volume…

4. Follow the wizard to choose a volume size.

5. Assign a drive letter.

6. Choose exFAT as the file system in the Format Partition screen.

7. Give the volume a new name.

8. Click Next.

9. Click Finish.

Windows

Windows will format the drive as exFAT and you'll be able to use the drive on both Windows and Mac.

More Tips

Click on Time and Language3. Next, click on the Change date and time formats link (See image below).4. On the next screen, click on Short Time and pick h:mm tt from the drop-down choices. Next, click on Long Time and choose h:mm:ss tt from the drop-down (See image below).To explain this better, on a Windows 10 computer that is displaying time in 24 hour clock format, you will find the Long Time and Short Time settings displaying a capital letter ‘ H‘ which stands for 24 hour time format. All that you need to do is to click on the drop down menu and pick a choice that has small ‘ h‘ in it.

Short Time: H:mm – Change this to h:mm tt. Long Time: H:mm:ss – Change this to h:mm:ss ttThe letters ‘tt’ in the above 12 hour settings stand for AM or PM. Hence, the time on your Windows 10 computer will now be displayed as 6:45 PM or AM.5. Once you have selected the 12 hour time format (any choice with a small ‘h’), just close the settings window. The change will be reflected immediately on both Long and Short time locations of your computer. What is Short and Long Time in Windows 10A Windows 10 computer displays date and time at two locations.

You will find the first location at the extreme bottom right corner of your screen.