In most cases, you should use APFS when formatting an external disk. And when one container on a disk expands, another contracts. They can expand as needed to house the data stored on them. However, containers on an APFS disk, which are similar to partitions on Mac OS Extended disk, don’t have a fixed size. The volumes on that partition are limited to the amount of space allocated to it when it was created. On a Mac OS Extended disk, when you create a partition, the size is fixed. One of the key features of APFS - and one of the reasons it has replaced Mac OS Extended - is that containers on an APFS-formatted disk can grow and shrink as needed. It’s designed for SSDs but works just as well on mechanical hard drives. Think of APFS as a modern, more flexible version of HFS+. Now, however, there’s a relatively new kid in town - APFS. For years, from the first version of Mac OS X until macOS Sierra, HFS+, also known as macOS Extended (Journaled), was the default file system, and the only question was whether you used the standard format or the case-sensitive or encrypted versions. The two native Mac file systems are APFS and HFS+. That’s because neither system is fully supported by macOS and the alternatives offer far more options. While your Mac can read and write the FAT system used by older versions of Windows, and with the help of additional software, NTFS, too, it’s not recommended that you format a drive using either of those if you intend to use the drive mainly with a Mac. What disk formats are compatible with macOS? The term just means the way in which data on the disk is organized and indexed and the options available for manipulating it. What is a disk format on Mac?īefore we discuss the options for formatting a disk, it’s worth explaining what we mean by disk format.

And while it’s pretty simple to reformat a drive using Disk Utility, there is one question you need to answer: what’s the best disk format for Mac? We’ll answer that question here. So, it’s likely that the first thing you will need to do when you buy an external hard drive or SSD for your Mac is to reformat it. And while you can buy external drives preformatted for Mac, they tend to be more expensive than those formatted for Windows. Even with the advent of cloud storage, adding that space usually means buying an external hard drive or SSD. There comes a time in every Mac user’s life when we need more space than is available on our machine’s startup disk.

But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here’s a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Best format for external hard drive mac