How to Format a USB Drive for Mac and PC

Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a student, or an office worker, the chances are you’ve found yourself in a situation where you need to use a USB drive on both your Mac and PC. There’s just one problem: your Mac-formatted USB drive doesn’t work on your PC or vice versa. But don’t despair. This guide demystifies the process of making your USB drive universally compatible.

Note: the methods below will erase and format your USB drive. If your drive contains data you’d like to back up, either copy them manually or clone the drive.

Formatting Your USB Drive on Mac

Let’s start off with macOS and how to format a drive to work on Windows and Mac.

Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.

Select your USB drive from the left panel.

Click the Erase button.

Choose exFAT as the format, then click Erase.

The exFAT file system is the best choice for a USB drive that needs to be used on both Mac and PC, as it can handle files of any size and be written to and read by Mac, Windows, and most Linux distributions.

Formatting Your USB Drive on Windows

Now that we have the Mac method sorted, let’s take a look at how to achieve the same thing in Windows.

Open File Explorer, right-click on your USB drive in the list of drives, then select Format.

Choose exFAT as the File System in the new window, and click Start to begin the format process.

In just a few steps, you’ve successfully made your USB drive Mac- and PC-friendly! Remember, formatting a USB drive will erase all the data on it, so make sure you’ve backed up any important files before you begin the process.

A Note on Partition-Mapping Schemes

In the past, when formatting a USB thumb drive in Windows or macOS, you may have seen an option to choose a partition-mapping scheme. Usually, the options would be between a GUID or MBR (Master Boot Record) scheme.

If you try to format a drive in Windows 10, 11, or the latest macOS, you won’t see this option presented to you during the process we described above. GUID is the modern standard, and in most cases, formatting utilities will default to it. When you’re formatting a USB drive as exFAT, it’s likely to use the older MBR format. When we formatted our drives in Windows and macOS without specifying the partition map, they both ended up as MBR.

MBR is the most compatible map, and if you’re given the choice, you should choose a thumb drive, as it’s limited to a massive 2TB, and your thumb drive is unlikely to be larger. For large external or internal drives, you’ll want GUID. Both Windows and macOS are perfectly happy with either.

You’re a Formatting Master!

Now you can confidently format your USB drive for maximum compatibility. The world of Mac and PC need not be as divided as you may think. With just a few clicks, your USB drive can serve as a bridge between the two.

Now that you can make a USB drive that will work on macOS, Windows, and even Linux, you may be interested in learning how to format a hard drive as NTFS on a Linux system.

Image credit: Unsplash. All screenshots by Sydney Butler.