Format Mac Passport drive to use on Windows

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hello,

I would like to use this drive WD My Passport for Mac External Hard Drive HDD, USB-C and USB-A Compatible | Western Digital on Windows machines.
My question is: is there any risk to formatting this to work with Windows computers? Because it’s a Passport drive and it has the encryption, is there any chance that by formatting it to make it unsusable?
I am asking because I did try to format an older 512 GB My Book drive with encryption, and it became unrecognisable on Windows. Basically I am no longer able to use it, luckily I didn’t have any data on it.
Thank you!

2

The encryption/decryption is handled by a chip on the logic board.

Formatting the drive does not wipe/format the chip.

There should be no risk in formatting the drive with your file system of choice if you know what you are doing.

But, it doesn’t sound like you do

3

Well, most external hard drives are designed to work for Windows computers. Windows was mainly optimized for NTFS (New Technology file system) format, on the other hand, APFS was created for the Mac OS. NTFS is not compatible with Mac and similarly, APFS does not get along with Windows. So if you’re trying to connect an external hard drive to a Mac or Windows, you might have to format the drive before as per the system’s requirement.

Further, I suggest you to check the below link that explains all the methods to format your external drive without any data loss:

Hope it helps!