![]() Option 1: Format to NTFS and buy this app for your Mac The alternative solutions do require more tinkering. The good news is, it's not exFAT or nothing. OK, what are my alternatives to using exFAT? And the same can be said for a Windows HD, if you only plan on connecting it to a PC, then NTFS is the way to go. However, if you plan on only using a drive on your Mac and it has MacOS High Sierra or newer installed, you'll want to stick to Apple's APFS format. And if that's how you plan on using your drive, then you're right - exFAT is the way to go. It comes down to which OS are you going to use the drive with?Īccording to the list above, formatting your hard drive to exFAT so that you can read and write on either a PC or Mac seems like the obvious solution. Natively read/write HFS+ on MacOS High Sierra and newer.Required for local Time Machine backupsĪPFS (Hierarchical File System, aka Mac OS Extended).Natively read/write HFS+ on MacOS up to Mac OS X Sierra.HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, aka Mac OS Extended) Full NTFS support on Mac requires paid third-party app.Natively read/write exFAT on Windows and MacOS.But before I can dig into what makes sense when, look over this quick rundown of the different standards and which OS each one is compatible with. The file format standard you use for your external drive will depend on how you plan on using the drive. ![]()
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![]() APFS was initially only available on SSDs (which as we’ve already said, shouldn’t be defragged anyway), but it arrived on hard drives and Fusion drives in 2018 with Mojave. A year later, in 2003, Hot File Adaptive Clustering arrived, which identifies files that are frequently accessed but rarely updated and moves them to a special area of the drive, defragging them during the process.Īpple then introduced APFS (Apple File System) in High Sierra in 2017. Then in Mac OS X 10.2, which arrived in 2002, the system got even cleverer at avoiding fragmentation. HFS+, which was introduced in 1998, could defrag files on the fly thanks to Hot File Clustering. Mac do not need to be defragmented because the file system (initially HFS+ and more recently APFS) prevents fragmentation and automatically defrags files if necessary – if the file has more than eight fragments, or is smaller than 20MB, it will be automatically defragged. If you are running High Sierra or Mojave, and your file system has been changed to Apple’s newer APFS, you will not be able to use any third party tools to defrag your Mac as there are none that work.Your Mac operating system does not predate 2002 (if it does can we suggest you update your Mac!).If any of the following applies to you we would suggest that defraging is not the solution to your problem: As we’ll explain below, you probably don’t need to defrag your Mac. ![]() |
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