If you’re really interested have a look at the book “Modern Operating Systems” by Andrew S. If you’re interested in this I can recommend the wikipedia articles. Backup, backup and backup!įootnote for the technical smart-ass: Why is FAT less secure than others? In short words: HFS+ and NTFS keep track of the changes you make and can recover if an error occurs. But make sure you’re not deleting important data. Here you can set the disk name and the file system. To reformat a disk select it and click the erase tab. In your Applications folder there is a Folder “Utilities” and here you find a App called “Disk Utility”.
So you wonder how to reformat a disk? Quite easy: exFAT is very similar to FAT but allows larger file sizes and larger disks (and some other stuff). But, you can do it with gdisk and mkfs for exfat. To check the file system format of the external storage drive, do the following: a) Open Disk Utility and select the greyed-out external drive from the sidebar. macOS Big Sur 11 supports reading and writing data from an APFS, HFS+, FAT32, and exFAT formatted storage drive. Windows is the fussiest about tiny issues. Check Compatibility of External Drive’s File System on macOS Big Sur. But I just couldn't find a way to take any flash drive or sdxc card, that had been formatted as something else, and turn it into a universal compatible exfat drive.
Unfortunately exFAT is only supported on Mac OS 10.6.5 and later. Well, exfat (fat64) is becoming ubiquitous with flash media.
If you use your stick also on Windows machines running XP SP2, Vista SP1 or Windows 7 you can use the very new file system exFAT. And it is also much saver in terms of data loss (see footnote). If you use your USB-stick only on Macs you will want to reformat it to HFS+ which allows (virtually) unlimited file sizes, longer file names and some Mac specific things. So maybe you would like to change the file system on your stick to something more modern.
There is also NTFS, (Windows default / does not work on Mac) and there is HFS+ which is the default for Mac OS X.įAT is by far the oldest file system and has some weaknesses:
Yet you might know that there are different types of disk formats. By default all USB-Sticks are formatted as FAT (MS-DOS default) so they work on Windows, Mac and Linux. Although the app is paid one and you will require to purchase, it is for around 3 ( or Rs 159).
I was able to Mount my 500 GB Samsung T5 SSD on my Xiaomi Poco F1 using this particular app.
If you’re not a nerd you probably just used it out of the box. Microsoft exFAT/NTFS for USB by Paragon Software ( Play Store Link) This app can be found in the play store and is one of the few apps which actually works. Each volume within an APFS container can have its own APFS format - APFS, APFS (Encrypted), APFS (Case-sensitive) or APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted).Quit possible that you own a USB-Stick (or USB-Hard-Drive) that is 4GB or larger (8GB seems to be standard now,right?). You can easily add or delete volumes in APFS containers. For example, folders named “Homework” and “HOMEWORK” are two different folders. For example, folders named “Homework” and “HOMEWORK” are two different folders.ĪPFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted): Uses the APFS format, is case-sensitive to file and folder names and encrypts the volume. Choose this option if you don’t need an encrypted or case-sensitive format.ĪPFS (Encrypted): Uses the APFS format and encrypts the volume.ĪPFS (Case-sensitive): Uses the APFS format and is case-sensitive to file and folder names. Now you can format your disk to NTFS file system on Mac and use this drive on a Windows PC. NTFS for Mac tool can extend your format options with NTFS in addition to APFS, HFS+ (Mac OS Extended), FAT, and exFAT. Each volume uses only part of the overall container, so the available space is the total size of the container, minus the size of all the volumes in the container.Ĭhoose one of the following APFS formats for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later.ĪPFS: Uses the APFS format. Microsoft NTFS file system is not available when you format a drive in Disk Utility. If desired, you can specify reserve and quota sizes for each volume. When a single APFS container has multiple volumes, the container’s free space is shared and automatically allocated to any of the individual volumes as needed. macOS 10.13 or later supports APFS for both bootable and data volumes.ĪPFS allocates disk space within a container (partition) on demand.
While APFS is optimised for the Flash/SSD storage used in recent Mac computers, it can also be used with older systems with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and external, direct-attached storage. Apple File System (APFS), the default file system for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later, features strong encryption, space sharing, snapshots, fast directory sizing and improved file system fundamentals.