How to format your new external hard drive using mac

Post date: Dec 31, 2014 8:39:09 PM

I want my external hard drive (HDD) to work with mac, Linux and Windows, as I work with all of them. What would be the best choice?

• FAT32 work with both Windows and Mac, but with severe limitation on single file size can't be bigger than 4GB. This is not ideal for data science which often encounters very large file size 10-100GB.
• NTFS is much better when talking about file size and performance (e.g. speed). It works well with Windows (of course), but only readable in Mac and Linux. Luckily, we can install NTFS-3g in both Mac and Linux so that it's read-writable.

I choose NTFS and do the following for each machine:

• Windows: Do nothing.
• Ubuntu: So simple. Just run this command on the terminal and it just works. Free.
  • sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g
• Mac: I use ntfs-3g from Paragon NTFS and I love it. It's very easy to install and everything works like charm. So, I will pay $20 and continue to use it.

I found this link (read the section "How To Format A New Hard Drive") very useful when formatting/partitioning the HDD using Mac. In fact, it's very intuitive after you open Disk Utility and follow the instruction there.

recommended resources:

Explain very well about the choice of filesystem: http://askubuntu.com/a/24428/175132

This is a nice introduction for each filesystem: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=16511127&postcount=2