It comes down to which OS are you going to use the drive with?Īccording to the list above, formatting your hard drive to exFAT so that you can read and write on either a PC or Mac seems like the obvious solution. Natively read/write HFS+ on MacOS High Sierra and newer.Required for local Time Machine backupsĪPFS (Hierarchical File System, aka Mac OS Extended).
HFS+ (Hierarchical File System, aka Mac OS Extended) But before I can dig into what makes sense when, look over this quick rundown of the different standards and which OS each one is compatible with. The file format standard you use for your external drive will depend on how you plan on using the drive.
