disk format that is acceptable for mac and windows

Because of this variety, you need to format portable disks so that they can move easily between the different operating systems you expect to use.īut to make that decision, you need to understand the two major factors that can affect your file system choice: portability and file size limits.

And if you carry files to friends' houses or when you travel, you never know what type of system you may want those files on. Many businesses and households have multiple PCs of different types in their home - Windows, macOS, and Linux being the most common. When you format a disk, the file system you choose essentially governs which devices can read or write to the disk. Since these file systems are key to the operating system making sense of the data, an OS cannot read data off of a disk without support for the file system with which the disk is formatted. Since only binary data is actually written to disks, the file systems provide a way to translate the physical recordings on a disk to the format read by an OS. Different file systems offer different ways of organizing data on a disk.

Disk format that is acceptable for mac and windows