“Do I need to reformat the drive to work on either a Mac or PC?”
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No, but you can if you want to. MOST external USB drives come formatted to use the NTFS file system, which should just be plug and play for an modern Mac, Windows, or Linux PC (I use all three platforms and just leave the drives NTFS almost all the time). Of course, if you WANT to, you CAN reformat the drive (to Ext4 for example, for Ubuntu Linux) and take advantage of certain perks, but it's absolutely not necessary.
Sorry, there was a problem. Please try again later.Hello Clyde, Please be informed that the WD Easystore External drive comes preformatted in NTFS format for Windows OS, However, in order to use the drive for macOS you can reformat the drive with macOS supported HFS+J file system by using this link: https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3879 .In order to use the drive with both Windows and MacOS you need to reformat the drive to exFAT file format by referring to the link: https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/20821 .Please be informed that reformatting is a data destructive process, please backup the data from the drive before reformatting it.-Need Help? Please see our "'Contact Us" page for information.
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