As a Mac user you must agree how crucial it is to get the hard drive formatted under correct format to run the Macintosh HD flawlessly on OS X. The disk utility gives us huge amount of authority to erase/format/partition a hard drive as per our need. The day a Mac user brings in a new external hard drive the first job is to get it formatted with the help of disk utility. If the hard drive is meant to be used only for Macs then formatting the drive under various Mac default format is most suited. Let us quickly look at those default formats included in the Disk Utility's Partition tab.
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)
- Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive Journaled)
- Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive Journaled, Encrypted)
- Ms-DOS (FAT)
ExFAT
Now an obvious question arises, which format is best suited for a hard drive. A new Mac user will certainly fall into confusion which one to select. So, let's make thing easy by understanding each of them one-by-one.
Now an obvious question arises, which format is best suited for a hard drive. A new Mac user will certainly fall into confusion which one to select. So, let's make thing easy by understanding each of them one-by-one.
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled): - Do you know, all Mac's hard drives comes pre-formatted with Journaled and they exclusively are used only for Macs. So, please forget if you want to read Ex-FAT with this format. It won't.
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted): - The encrypted part included in this format tightens up the security of the hard drive & its data from an unauthorized user. It protects the hard drive by putting a password which is required to mount it every time. One must always remember this password to access the drive easily. If password is forgotten then the hard drive will remain in lock mode depriving you of all the data inside it. Though using a Mac data recovery tool will let you scan the hard drive (an unmounted drive) & recover all your files. This kind of format is mostly used by professionals who don’t compromise with their data & drive access with others.
- Mac OS Extended (Case-Sensitive Journaled): - This format is least recommended for a user to format his/her hard drive. The reason behind this is, a normal Journaled format will analyze two files like 'xyz.jpg' and 'Xyz.jpg' present in the same folder as same. On the other hand, Case-Sensitive format will view both the files as different as the alphabets used to name the file are in lower & upper case respectively. This would result in many applications to a fail launch, hence not recommended to use.
- FAT: - Now, this traditional format is used to format a hard drive which would make it run on both a Mac and PC. You can find numerous articles on how to format a hard drive for Mac & PC stating to use the FAT format. The only limitation with FAT is it won't allow a file to save which is larger than size 4GB. To overcome FAT limitations, Ex-fat is recommended which operates faster and does not limit to 4 GB limitations.
- NTFS: - This format is not at all supported by a Mac, neither will you find in the menu. But, yes with the help of a professional non-Apple tool, user can run to read the NTFS formatted hard drive.
Why Macs don't care about NTFS file systems?
When you switch from a PC to Mac then this question strikes you at several interval trying to find out how you can run your PC hard drive formatted with NTFS on Mac OS X? To be candid, there is no inbuilt OS X mechanism available in Mac to run a hard drive formatted with New Technology File Systems. If you connect a NTFS formatted hard drive to Mac then it will show up but only in read-mode, OS X Mac will not write a piece of data onto it. Probably, you could have wished if both Apple and Microsoft have some common shared platform for their respective operating systems providing full opportunity to access applications within different file systems (say NTFS and HFS). Unfortunately both Macs and PCs are two different sides of the coin.
While Microsoft has licensed NTFS & no one else can use it for development of their OSs. Similarly, HFS+ is licensed by Apple and without the proper ownership of any of the technology it would certainly not be possible to work on it for both the computer giants.
Facts to know about NTFS on Macs?
When you switch from a PC to Mac then this question strikes you at several interval trying to find out how you can run your PC hard drive formatted with NTFS on Mac OS X? To be candid, there is no inbuilt OS X mechanism available in Mac to run a hard drive formatted with New Technology File Systems. If you connect a NTFS formatted hard drive to Mac then it will show up but only in read-mode, OS X Mac will not write a piece of data onto it. Probably, you could have wished if both Apple and Microsoft have some common shared platform for their respective operating systems providing full opportunity to access applications within different file systems (say NTFS and HFS). Unfortunately both Macs and PCs are two different sides of the coin.
While Microsoft has licensed NTFS & no one else can use it for development of their OSs. Similarly, HFS+ is licensed by Apple and without the proper ownership of any of the technology it would certainly not be possible to work on it for both the computer giants.
Facts to know about NTFS on Macs?
- With bootcamp assistant, the Mac partition is formatted with the MS-DOS (FAT) file system and not with NTFS. Windows OS on Mac access only its drive (partition) and not the OS X.
- NTFS on Mac exists but only in extremely limited features. A Mac is able to read a NTFS formatted hard drive but write feature is unavailable to this date. Apple restricted itself to read mode although many speculated that write version to NTFS drive would be made in upcoming versions of the OS X. But this has never been officially announced or done by Apple Inc.
Tuxera for Mac is one such utility software that can write to a NTFS formatted hard drive device in the very simplest form. Downloading and installing this app is as simple as any other utility. The .PKG file is installed on your hard drive and it refreshes itself to locate mounted NTFS media devices. To launch the application, go to System Preferences and click on the Tuxera icon. Here is it's first screenshot
- By default these four options will be already selected. You can also Disable this app by clicking the Disable button. The GUI is made quite user friendly. For the less technical users, the first option which is “Enable File System Caching”, implies that Window OS by default saves the data that is read and write to-from a disk. Same would be done here in Mac too. By this option, the read-write operations will access the caches data from the OS X rather than from the disk.
- This option will enable user to view all mounted NTFS hard drives as well as devices.
Pros of this app – Genuine application to read/write a NTFS disk on Mac. Very user friendly, not at all confusing or technical. Affordable choice over Parallel for Macs.
Cons of this app – This useful software is available for 15 days free download period and cost $15 to use it for life-long.
Alternative app for Tuxera is NTFS 3G which costs free. But don't install and use both the apps simultaneously as both of them could collide.