The easiest way to do that is to hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in Disk Utility to find the program. How to format an external drive on macOS with exFAT Dual formatting – If you are a user who prefers to have both APFS and NTFS file system on a single external hard disk, you can partition and dual format the hard drive.Since exFAT formatted external hard disk are readable and writable by both the operating systems exFAT – Formatting a hard drive with the exFAT file system.Lets us first understand how to make the external hard drive compatible with Mac and Windows? using exFAT and Dual formatting? How to create an external hard disk compatible on Mac and Windows? Let’s get down to make the external hard drive compatible with Mac and Windows. This does not require any third-party application or assistance of any additional software. Fortunately, you could create an external hard disk which is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS with the help of this article. However, Windows was mainly optimized for NTFS (New Technology file system) format, on the other hand, APFS was created for the Mac OS.Īs we all know NTFS is not compatible with Mac and similarly APFS does not get along with Windows. An external hard drive that supports both Windows and Mac operating systems can be extremely helpful to users who work on both the operating systems.