Before I partition

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I just bought the 5tg easystore. I am transitioning from an iMAC to a Windows laptop. If I partition my new portable drive (for Windows AND Mac)…and I save all of my files from my MAC computer…will I be able to open those files on my Windows computer?

I’ve read where partitioning drives larger than 2tb can be troublesome and I don’t want even start down that road if I won’t be able to open those MAC files on my HP laptop.

Thanks in advance!

2

No trouble at all … select GPT when formatting/partitioning a hard drive

Do a test … format the 5TB Easystore exFAT using GPT (GUID Partition Table) copy some files to it when finished and plug the drive in the HP Laptop.

I don’t know what “MAC” files you are talking about :neutral_face:… but if they are MAC Specific then WINDOWS probably won’t know what they are.

Format and use exFAT file system which is readable on a Mac and PC

All files eg. Videos/Music/Photo’s will be accessible on both computers (unless there files that are Mac specific, ie created by Mac software and readable on Mac only)

3

Great! Thank you for the advice. I’ll give it a try today.
One last question for you…do I need to format each partition (Ie…perform the formatting steps on the hp AND perform them on the Mac) and if so, does it matter if I do the exFAT formatting on my Mac first or my HP Laptop first?
((the files on the Mac I’m wanting to utilize on my laptop are NOT Mac specific. Mostly images & videos))

4

“each” ? … me personally, i just format the hard drive as 1 single partition

again, if it’s 1 single partition then no need to repeat the process

It shouldn’t matter … but me being a Windows user and not a Mac user, i would do it on the Windows PC then it should work on both PC/Mac

Pictures and Videos should be fine … but remember Videos have lots of different formats and codecs (eg. MKV,AVI,MP4,WMV, AVC H.264, HEVC H.265 MPEG-4 etc etc) which may work on both Win/Mac or work on one OS but not the other.