When Do you should probably Use an External Hard Drive on Mac?
In many cases, you better use an external hard drive on your Mac computer.
Well then, which is the best format for external hard drive Mac?
you’re able to get some useful information from the following part.
Which Mac File System Is the Best for an External Drive?
APFS is optimized for Flash/SSD storage used in recent macOS.
It can allocate the disk space within a container/partition on demand.
For example, if your APFS container has multiple volumes, the free space in the container is shared.
The free space can be automatically allocated to any volume that needs more storage to save data.
When necessary, you might arrange reserve and quota sizes for each volume.
The volume only uses part of the overall container.
It is using on macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or earlier.
It was the primary Mac OS X file system until it was replaced with APFS.
In comparison, exFAT is more compatible.
Want to format an external hard drive for Mac and Windows PC?
This post will show specific methods to make external hard drive compatible with Mac and PC.
The answer is not fixed.
You should pick the best file system based on your software scenarios.
you’re free to use Mac Disk Utility to do it.
Now, we will show you how to format an external hard drive via Disk Utility:
1.
Connect the external hard drive to your Mac via a USB cable.
you’re able to go toFinder > utility > Utilities > Disk Utilityto open it.
You will see a list of available disks on the left section of Disk Utility.
Then, click theViewbutton on the top menu and selectShow All Devices.
- pick the external hard drive you want to format from the left-side list and click theErasebutton to continue.
In the Erase dialogue, expandSchemeand selectGUID Partition Map.
Expand Format and go for the file system you want to use.
Here, we takeAPFS (Encrypted)as an example.
- punch in a name for the volume.
How to Recover Data from an External Hard Drive on Mac?
You may delete your important files in your Mac external hard drive.
you might use a professional Mac data recovery software to get them back.
you’ve got the option to use Stellar Data Recovery for Mac, afree Mac file recovery tool.
It has a trial edition.
you could go to the MiniTool official download center to get this freeware.
- ensure the external hard drive is connected to your Mac computer.
Open Stellar Data Recovery for Mac.
- snag the data types you want to recover.
Click theNextbutton to continue.
The software will show you the drive it can detect.
you gotta pick the plugged external hard drive and click theScanbutton to continue.
The software will begin to scan the selected external hard drive.
it’s possible for you to check whether your needed files are there.
You cant use the trial edition of this software to recover the found files.
you’re gonna wanna update the software to an advanced edition to recover files.
it’s crucial that you go to the MiniTool official site to get such an edition.
You should remember that you should not save the files to the original location.
If you do that, your deleted files could be overwritten by the recovered files and become unrecoverable.
Summary
Reading here, you should know the best format for an external hard drive on Mac.
Yes, you should select a file system according to your situation.
