
Once the formatting is complete and you get a message that says “Operation successful,” click “Done.” To Windows 8 and Earlier Now, click the “Partition” button at the top of the Disk Utility and click “Format.” Choose “exFAT” from the drop-down menu that appears and click “Apply” to format the drive, which will take a few minutes.

Click the Disk Utility’s “Erase” button assign the drive a name in the “Name” field then hit “Erase,” and click “Done” when the erasing process is complete. Here, you’ll usually see two listings of partitions available on the drive – select the listing that is furthest left. To start formatting, connect your WD Passport to your Mac then open “Mac HD” and click “Applications,” “Utilities” and “Disk Utility.” From the Disk Utility window, select the Passport hard drive. If you’ve got a WD external drive for Mac platforms and you want it to work on a Windows 10 PC, exFAT format is your best bet. Formatting your drive will erase all its data, so be sure to back it up before making the change. Hard drives formatted to exFAT or FAT32 can read and write data on both Mac and PC operating systems, though FAT32 is limited to a 4-gigabyte-per-file size limit. However, by formatting your My Passport differently, you can ensure compatibility in a variety of different ways. Wd Passport For Mac Reader On Windows Format NTFS-formatted drives work with Windows computers, and HFS+ drives work with Mac. Here’s something your My Passport for Mac Quick Install Guide might not tell you: Hard drives usually come formatted in two different ways, one catering to Windows and one catering to Mac. When it comes to cross-platform flexibility, you’ve got a few options for crossing the Mac and PC streams. 2 Can I Back up a Mac & PC Data to the Same Hard Drive?Īs of 2018, Western Digital offers no shortage of external drives for Mac computers – from the My Book Essential to the My Book Pro and the My Book Studio, nearly 30 WD drives play nicely with Apple’s macOS operating system, as does the My Passport Studio model.īut with more than 262.5 million PCs shipped in 2017, according to data from Statista, there’s a good chance your Passport Studio will need to play nicely with a Windows computer, too.

