• Exfat For Mac And Windows
• Exfat Reader For Windows
• Exfat And Mac Os
• Mount Exfat On Mac

USB flash drives are the little stick-like devices that we carry along in our pockets as portable external storage. But these little devices pack quite a punch; they can double up as your mobile movie library, photo collection, backup drive, OS boot volume, or just a way to transfer stuff from one computer to another. Each time you wish to use them for a unique purpose, it requires cleaning them and sometimes even formatting them to a file system suited to the target environment. Formatting is also a good way to rid the memory stick of unwanted errors or virus/malware programs.

One important thing to remember is always taking a backup of your data before beginning the format procedure.

When it comes to formatting a USB drive, which format should you go for – FAT or NTFS? Or any other? Moreover, how can you change the format of your USB drive from FAT to NTFS to exFAT or FAT32? Let’s answer these questions one at a time.

Follow these steps to format your drive in exFAT for use on the Mac & Windows: Connect and power on the drive if it has a button/switch. Click on Finder in your Dock and go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility or use Spotlight to search for Disk Utility. Any Mac running 10.6.5 (Snow Leopard) or 10.7 (Lion) supports exFAT, while PCs running Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows 7 are compatible. If you know you’ll be using computers running updated versions of these operating systems, exFAT is the clear best choice. My experience is that a partition formatted as exFAT on Mac OSX will be unreadable on Windows 7. Can anyone confirm this? I was using Mac OSX 10.5 and Windows 7 Professional x64.

Which file system should I choose for formatting my USB?

When it comes to formatting a USB drive, which format should you go for – FAT or NTFS? Or any other? Moreover, how can you change the format size of your USB drive from FAT to NTFS to exFAT or FAT32? Let’s answer these questions one at a time.

For a hard drive to be able to be read and written to in both a PC and Mac computer, it must be formatted to ExFAT or FAT32 file format. FAT32 has several limitations, including a 4 GB per-file limit. After our Windows encryption showdown, reader Jerod passed along this tip to make sure your encrypted volumes, especially external hard drives, in Windows play nicely with other platforms like OS.

In most Windows systems, while formatting a USB 4 file system choices are presented to you – NTFS, FAT, FAT32 or exFAT. You should choose one that suits your USB purpose as well as target environment. Additionally, here are the benefits of each of these file systems to help you make your choice.

Benefits of NTFS file system

If you select NTFS file system, you get:

• Better disk space management.
• Less space wastage.
• Increased reliability and security with file encryption.
• Small data clusters.
• Compressed data so as to save disk space.
• Ability to create permissions for individual files and folders.
• Ability to read / write files larger than 32GB and up to maximum partition size.

Benefits of FAT / FAT32 file system

Note: For USB flash drives with capacity larger than 32GB, FAT / FAT32 formatting option is not available.

If you select FAT or FAT32 file system:

• Faster performing USB owing to write operations lesser.
• Less memory usage.
• Quick disk scanning.
• Compatibility with almost all operating systems.
• Less space is dedicated to the file system data to allow more free space to hold other data.

Benefits of exFAT file system

If you select exFAT file system, you get:

• Ability to create partitions larger than 32GB.
• Better disk space management.
• Ability to read / write files larger than 4GB.

So if you’re USB flash drive which has a capacity greater than 32GB, you should select NTFS or exFAT. Other than that, you should choose the format that suits your work. For example, if you use the USB on multiple operating systems, going for FAT would be better.

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How to format USB to FAT / FAT32 / NTFS / exFAT using Windows Explorer?

FAT or FAT 32 file system is the option selected by default for formatting a USB flash drive on Windows XP. FAT or FAT32 is also the default file system most music players in cars recognise. So if on plugging your USB into your car’s music player you’ve faced an error saying – “cannot read”, check its file system and change it.

Here’s the procedure to format USB to NTFS / FAT / FAT32 / exFAT:

Step 1: Plug in the memory stick into your computer and allow it to be detected. Once it is recognised, you should see an Autoplay dialogue box pop up asking you to choose the next action. If it doesn’t appear, you can open My Computer and see if the USB is detected as a newly mounted volume. You can also find the USB under Disk Drives in Device Manager (right-click on My Computer -> Manage).

Step 2: Right-click on the USB drive shown in My Computer and select “Format”. This will open a dialogue box displaying the formatting options.

Step 3: Select the desired file system from NTFS, FAT, FAT32 or exFAT from the “File System” drop-down, then punch in the name that you wish to assign to the USB drive under “Volume label” and also select a “Format option”.

Step 4: Once you’ve made sure all options are correct, and you have a backup of the important data on the USB, click on “Start” to initiate the process. When prompted, click on “Ok” to confirm that you wish to erase the data on the drive and format it.

How to format USB to NTFS / exFAT / FAT / FAT32 using Command Prompt?

Step 1: Plug in the memory stick into your computer and allow it to be detected.

Step 2: Open Command Prompt (Start -> Accessories -> Command Prompt or Start -> Run -> type “cmd” -> Enter)

Step 3 : Supposing your USB drive is assigned the letter “E”: type the following command in the Command Prompt:

For FAT: format E: /fs:FAT
For FAT32: format E: /fs:FAT32
For NTFS: format E: /fs:NTFS
For exFAT: format E: /fs:EXFAT

Step 4 : When prompted, press Y (for Yes) or N (for No) to continue or stop the formatting.

Things to remember when formatting to NTFS

When formatting to NTFS file system, you need to remember to enable the “removal policy” of the USB to the “better performance” option. Here’s how to do this:

1. Right-click on the USB and select “Properties”.
2. Under the “Hardware” tab choose the USB drive from the listed disks.
3. Click on “Properties”.
4. Select “policies” -> “better performance”.
5. Click “OK”.

You have formatted your USB drive successfully! Great! Now What if you want to again get back your precious photos, audios or videos???

The best possible solution to go for will be to download and run Stellar Photo Recovery Software. The addedbenefit of keeping Stellar Photo Recovery Software in your system is that you can take a backup of your entire drive. The top menu bar of the main screen section of the software includes a ‘Create Image‘ option which is used to create an image of your entire drive. This image can be used as a backup for recovering data at a later stage. To recover back your multimedia files, if lost accidentally, you can try the demo version of the software absolutely free:

Final Words

Hope our pointers above will help you the next time you need to format your memory stick. Always remember to backup your data before beginning the formatting process and choose a file system that suits your requirement. However, if you want to recover data from a corrupt or inaccessible USB drive, read our next post.

Apple’s macOS can read from Windows-formatted NTFS drives, but can’t write to them out of the box. Here are a few solutions for getting full read/write access to NTFS drives.

This could be useful if you want to write to a Boot Camp partition on your Mac, as Windows system partitions must use the NTFS file system. However, for external drives, you should probably use exFAT instead. macOS can natively read and write to exFAT drives, just like Windows can.

Three Options

RELATED:What’s the Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS?

There are several options for this, and you’ll need to choose one:

• Paid Third-Party Drivers: There are third-party NTFS drivers for Mac that you can install, and they’ll work quite well. These are paid solutions, but they’re easy to install and should offer better performance than the free solutions below.
• Free Third-Party Drivers: There’s a free and open-source NTFS driver you can install on a Mac to enable write support. Unfortunately, this take a bit of extra work to install, especially on Macs with the new System Integrity Protection feature, added in 10.11 El Capitan. It’s slower than paid solutions and automatically mounting NTFS partitions in read-write mode is a security risk.
• Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Write Support: The macOS operating system includes experimental support for writing to NTFS drives. However, it’s off by default and requires some messing around in the terminal to enable it. It isn’t guaranteed to work properly and could potentially cause problems with your NTFS file system. In fact, we’ve had it corrupt data before. We really don’t recommend using this. It’s disabled by default for a reason.

We highly recommend paying for a third-party NTFS driver if you need to do this as the other solutions don’t work as well and are more work to set up.

The Best Paid Third-Party Driver: Paragon NTFS for Mac

Paragon NTFS for Mac costs $19.95 and offers a ten-day free trial. It’ll install cleanly and easily on modern versions of macOS, including macOS 10.12 Sierra and Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. It really does “just work”, so it’s the best option if you’re willing to pay a small amount of money for this feature.

You also won’t have to fiddle with terminal commands to manually mount partitions, insecurely mount partitions automatically, or deal with potential corruption as you will with the free drivers below. If you need this feature, paying for software that does it properly is worth it. We cannot stress this enough.

If you own a Seagate drive, be aware that Seagate offers a free download of Paragon NTFS for Mac so you won’t have to purchase anything extra.

You could also purchase Tuxera NTFS for Mac, which costs $31 and offers a fourteen-day free trial. But Paragon NTFS does the same thing and is cheaper.

The Best Free Third-Party Drivers: FUSE for macOS

This method is free, but it requires a good bit of work, and is less secure. To make your Mac automatically mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode, you’ll have to temporarily disable System Integrity Protection and replace one of Apple’s built-in tools with a binary that is more vulnerable to attack. So this method is a security risk.

However, you can use FUSE to mount NTFS partitions in read-write mode manually if you don’t mind using the Terminal. This is more secure, but it’s more work.

First, download FUSE for macOS and install it. Use the default options when installing it.

RELATED:How to Install Packages with Homebrew for OS X

You’ll also need Apple’s command line developer tools installed to continue. If you haven’t installed them yet, you can open a Terminal window from Finder > Applications > Utilities and run the following command to do so:

Click “Install” when you’re prompted to install the tools.

RELATED:How to Install Packages with Homebrew for OS X

In addtion, you’ll need to download and install homebrew if you haven’t already installed it on your Mac. Homebrew is a “package manager” for Mac OS X. Copy-paste the following command into a Terminal window and press Enter to install it:

Press Enter and provide your password when prompted. The script will automatically download and install Homebrew.

Once you’ve installed the developer tools and Homebrew, run the following command in a Terminal window to install ntfs-3g:

You can now manually mount NTFS partitions in read/write mode. From a terminal window, run the following command to create a mount point at /Volumes/NTFS. You only need to do this once.

When you connect an NTFS drive to the computer, run the following command to list any disk partitions:

You can then identify the device name of the NTFS partition. Just look for the partition with the Windows_NTFS file system. In the screenshot below, it’s /dev/disk3s1 .

The NTFS partition was probably automatically mounted by your Mac, so you’ll need to unmount it first. Run the following command, replacing /dev/disk2s1 with the device name of your NTFS partition.

To mount the drive, run the following command, replacing /dev/disk2s1 with the device name of your NTFS partition.

You’ll see the file system mounted at /Volumes/NTFS. It will also appear on your desktop as a normal mounted drive. You can eject it normally when you want to unplug it.

If you’re happy manually mounting partitions with the above instructions, you don’t have to continue.

RELATED:How to Disable System Integrity Protection on a Mac (and Why You Shouldn’t)

If you want to make your Mac automatically mount NTFS drives you connect in read-write mode, you’ll need to disable System Integrity Protection.

Warning: You probably don’t want to do this! The software’s official instructions warn that this is a security risk. You will be replacing the NTFS mount tools in your Mac with the ntfs-3g tools, which will run as the root user. Because of the way Homebrew installs software, malware running on your Mac could overwrite these tools. It’s probably not work the risk, but we’ll explain how to do if if you want to take the risk.

Reboot your Mac and hold Command+R while it’s booting. It’ll boot into a special recovery mode environment.

Launch a terminal from the Utilities menu in recovery mode and run the following command:

Once you have, reboot your Mac normally.

From the Mac desktop, open a Terminal window again and run the following commands to make ntfs-3g function:

Lastly, re-enable System Integrity Protection. Reboot your Mac and hold Command+R while it’s booting to enter recovery mode. Launch a terminal in recovery mode and run the following command:

Exfat Reader For Windows

Once you have, reboot your Mac. NTFS-write support should be functioning now.

To undo your changes and uninstall everything, you’ll need to first disable System Integrity Protection. After you do, run the following commands:

You can then uninstall FUSE for macOS from its panel in the System Preferences window and re-enable System Integrity Protection.

You can see why we recommend the $20 option instead now, huh?

Apple’s Experimental NTFS-Writing Support: Don’t Do This, Seriously

We don’t recommend the below method because it’s the least tested. This might not work properly, so don’t blame us or Apple if you experience problems. It’s still unstable as of macOS 10.12 Sierra, and it may never be fully stable. This is really just here for educational purposes.

First, be sure that your drive has a convenient single-word label. If it doesn’t, change its label. This will make this process easier.

You’ll first need to launch a terminal. Navigate to Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal or press Command+Space, type Terminal, and press Enter.

Type the following command into the terminal to open the /etc/fstab file for editing in the nano text editor:

Add the following line to nano, replacing “NAME” with the label of your NTFS drive:

Exfat And Mac Os

Press Ctrl+O to save the file after you’re done, and then press Ctrl+X to close nano.

(If you have multiple NTFS drives you want to write to, add a different line for each.)

Connect the drive to the computer—unplug it and reconnect it if it’s already connected—and you’ll see it under the “/Volumes” directory. In a Finder window, you can click Go > Go to Folder and type “/Volumes” into the box to access it. It won’t pop up automatically and appear on your desktop like drives normally do.

To undo this change later, just repeat the above process to open the /etc/fstab file in nano. E reader for mac. Delete the line you added to the file and save your changes.

Most Mac users will be better off formatting external drives with exFAT, ensuring they work well on both Windows and Mac OS X without any extra work. if you must write to an NTFS drive, one of the paid, third-party drivers will be the easiest option with the best performance and least risk of file corruption.

Mount Exfat On Mac

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