external hard drive formatting?
I've got a transcend 1TB hard drive that works great with my mac normally, but as soon as I try and download/drag a file thats above 4GB it doesn't work. Is there anyway I can change this without having to delete/move anything on the hard drive? My friend said that he could format it to NTFS, but I said no because I heard that macs are unable to read hard drives that are formatted in that way. Cheers
April 10, 2014
5 Comments • Newest first
This article shows you how to change from FAT32 to NTFS without losing data.
http://www.tweakandtrick.com/2012/02/convert-fat32-to-ntfs-file-system.html
make a partition
Ah okay that was what I feared. I'll do that then, thanks dude
@Staralex External drives are usually formatted as "FAT32" because that is compatible with both Windows PCs and Macs.
However, as you've seen, 4GB is the largest file size FAT32 supports.
"exFAT", as recommended by 2005chuy is an "extended" version of FAT32 which is still compatible between Windows and Mac, but it allows larger file sizes.
However, if you only use the external drive for your Mac, there's no reason to use exFAT. You should just reformat the drive as HFS+ on the Mac.
Unfortunately of course, formatting will erase all the files currently on the external drive.
What you could do, if you have enough space on your Mac would be to copy all the files from the external hard drive to a temporary folder on the Mac, then format the external drive as exFAT, then copy the files back onto the external drive.
Sadly, there's no way to "convert" the drive (change the format without deleting the files) from a FAT32 drive to either exFAT or HFS+
Format it as exFat if it's not only going to be used for your mac.