Much better, except for that pesky 4GB limit. If you format it from a Mac running 10.7 Lion, the drive partition can be up to 2TB. If you format your FAT32 drive in Windows, the drive partition cannot be larger than 32GB. The other limitation is the total size of the partition. This is a deal-breaker if you work with huge files. For example, you cannot save files that are larger than 4GB on a FAT32-formatted drive. Unfortunately, FAT32 is a very old file system and has some technical limitations. It works with all versions of Mac OS X and Windows. The most universally supported way to format your drive is with the FAT32 file system. However, you won’t be able to move files in the other direction, from Mac to PC. So if you need to get files from a PC to your Mac, NTFS is a decent option. Macs can read files on NTFS drives, but it cannot write to them. The native Windows file system is NTFS, which is only partially compatible with Mac OS X.

This isn’t a good solution if you need your drive to work on any PC without installing software, though. When you install MacDrive on a Windows PC, it will be able to seamlessly read & write to HFS+ drives. If you’re only going to be using your external or USB flash drive with certain PCs – such as at home or the office – you might be interested in a program called MacDrive. But while HFS+ is the best way to format drives for use on Macs, Windows does not support it. Mac OS X’s native file system is HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended), and it’s the only one that works with Time Machine. In fact, there are four ways you can format an external or USB flash drive to achieve varying degrees of compatibility between Macs and PCs. Since Mac OS X and Windows use totally different file systems, the way a drive is formatted can determine what type of computer it will work with. Need to access or transfer files between Mac and PC? As simple as this task sounds, it’s not very straightforward for inexperienced users.

Learn a few ways to make your drive Mac and PC friendly. If you have an external hard drive or USB flash drive that you’d like to use on both Macs and Windows PCs, choosing the right file system to format the drive can be confusing.

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