PCMag reviews products, but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. When you have a new hard drive, or when you're reinstalling Windows, the OS may ask you to format the drive. If given a choice, the two common modes are NTFS and FAT32. But what are those, and why would you choose one over the other? The only difference between a Mac hard drive and a PC hard drive is what file system it's formatted in; Mac hard drives usually come formatted in FAT32, which will work on both Macs and PCs, but isn't optimal for the MacBook's operating system. How to format a USB drive to FAT32 on a Mac The main reason for formatting a USB drive as Fat32 on a Mac is that you want to be able to use the drive on a Windows PC, as well as a Mac — perhaps to transfer files between the two machines. We break down the differences between FAT32 vs. What They Mean FAT32 is the older of the two drive formats. FAT32 is the most common version of the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system created back in 1977 by Microsoft. Mac version of snipping tool. It eventually found its way on the IBM PC's PC-DOS in 1981, and carried over to MS-DOS when that became a standalone product. FAT had been the standard format for floppy disks and hard drives all through the DOS years, and versions of Windows up to and including Windows 8. NTFS (New Technology Files System) is the newer drive format. Windows Xp Fat32 Format ToolMicrosoft introduced NTFS in 1993, as a component of the corporate-oriented Windows NT 3.1 and then Windows 2000, though it didn't become common on consumer PCs until Windows XP in 2001. Windows 7 and 8 default to NTFS format on new PCs. Compatibility FAT32 is read/write compatible with a majority of recent and recently obsolete operating systems, including DOS, most flavors of Windows (up to and including 8), Mac OS X, and many flavors of UNIX-descended operating systems, including Linux and FreeBSD. NTFS, on the other hand, is fully read/write compatible with Windows from Windows NT 3.1 and Windows XP up to and including Windows 8. Mac OS X 10.3 and beyond have NFTS read capabilities, but writing to a NTFS volume requires a third party software utility like Paragon NTFS for Mac. There are other hacks and workarounds for NTFS on the Mac, but in any case NTFS is only semi-compatible with OS X. NTFS on Linux systems is spotty for both read and write operations. Look for NTFS-3G driver support on your Linux support page to see if it's built in. File Size Matters FAT32 file size support tops out at 4GB and volume size tops out at 2TB. This means that you're limited to 2TB FAT32 partitions if you want to use a 4TB drive. It also means that you are limited to 4GB files. This is a concern with uncompressed high-definition movie files, where 30GB files are not unheard of.
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