format wd external hard drive for mac and pc

In terms of brand-new WD Elements, there is no such scruple, straightforward format as the drive for Mac. It is a disaster if you lose some important files. You can reformat the drive with a macOS-supported file system to use it on Mac without any limitations.įor WD Elements in use, reformatting will erase all data stored on the drive. If you want to remove the incompatibility to read and write to the WD Elements on your Mac, reformatting the WD Elements for Mac works. And it is impossible to share files between NTFS-formatted WD Elements and Mac. You can view your files by opening them but can't make any changes to those files nor create/save/move any files on the NTFS-formatted WD Elements on Mac. Hence, the incompatibility between the files system and the operating system cause you can read NTFS on Mac but can not write to it. However, such a format is not compatible with macOS. Some other hard drives such as Seagate, Samsung usually format the drives with NTFS when shipped out.

If the same scenario also happens to you, it is highly like that the WD Elements is pre-formatted as NTFS, a file system applied for Windows PC. They bought a WD Elements drive from the market but found that they failed to use it on the Mac. Most average computer users are familiar with the operating system running on their devices but not the files system(as called format), the way computers organize data stored on media such as drive. Then, formatting WD Elements for Mac can solve this issue.

If you are looking for a low-cost, high-capacity, and easy-to-use external hard drive to expand your Mac's storage or use it as a backup drive, WD Elements is an excellent buy.īut some Mac users may encounter problems when they want to use WD Elements on Mac, such as the external hard drive read only on Mac.

Format wd external hard drive for mac and pc