Any changes you make on files on this system is permanent. Though for your external SSD drive you do have a choice. Like the Apple silicon M1 Mac and M2 Mac come with APFS on their internal drives by default. The only drawback of exFAT is that it doesn’t support Journaling, i.e., cannot keep track of file changes. The best format for your SSD on your new Mac is APFS (Apple File System). You can have a maximum of 4GB size limit per file which is not ideal. Now you can plug into any OS – even Linux, and it will work in reading and write mode. You might argue why not use FAT32 which works for both the OS’s. Now that we know the good and bad about every file system, let see how to format a drive in Windows, MAC, and Linux.

Click Start and close this window when finished. How to Format an External Hard drive or Pen drive.

In the File System dropdown, choose exFAT.

Open up File Explorer and right-click on the drive.

Plug-in your drive into the computer’s USB port.

After these steps, everything will be lost forever. It is where exFAT or Extended File Allocation Table comes into the picture. If you don’t know, exFAT was created to be used on flash drives like USB or SD cards. So the question is how do you format a hard drive using exFAT? The answer is even more straightforward.īefore we go ahead, if you have anything on your drive, make sure to backup everything.

Don’t worry if it isn’t there you can get it back. RELATED: What Is a Solid State Drive (SSD), and Do I Need One In most cases there will be an icon on your desktop named This PC. So I needed a format which is both read and write on both the systems. The simplest way to format an SSD is through File Explorer. I am the kind of person who needs to switch between both the OS daily.

Format ssd for mac on windows