Western Digital My Passport Format Mac Os X A Western Digital external hard drive can be used on both Windows and Mac OSX. This is useful if a drive is being used under both Operating System (OS).

As the cost per GB of hard drive space falls, it becomes practical to buy a larger external hard drive and use it for several purposes. And that is exactly what partitioning up – splitting using the Mac operating system software allows you to do. Let me teach you in 10 steps how to partition WD My Passport for Mac. Manufactures two types of the WD My Passport hard drive. One has for Mac as part of the description and is preformatted to HFS+ (equivalent to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) File System. The other type is formatted and is simply called WD My Passport – no for Mac after the title. Whether you have the WD My Passport for Mac or have bought the NTFS version they both need to be formatted first before partitioning. How to insert an excel spreadsheet into word for mac.

If you are not sure how to format your WD My Passport drive take a look at. If you would like to take a look at some detail on the WD My Passport hard drive I have an article that so you can fully gen up. Your WD My Passport all formatted? Now you’re ready to partition your My Passport external drive. Table of Contents • • • • • • • • • Not sure what partitioning is? It’s a software process for dividing up your external drive into different sized sectors so that you can devote a particular part to a certain job.

For example; You want to use your drive for Time Machine backups and you also want to copy and paste files onto the drive. Although in theory you could do that without partitioning, it is best practice to devote a section to Time Machine and another section to copying and pasting. When you are using the copy and pasting part you won’t see the Time Machine backups and visa versa. If you want a section of your WD Passport for Mac and PC, it needs to be formatted in a particular way so that both the Mac and PC can read and write from the drive. And you can’t share that partition with Time Machine.

In addition PCs are more prone to getting viruses. Having a partition won’t prevent the most destructive viruses from trashing the drive, though it will restrict some. Before you Partition Think about what you plan to do with the hard drive and the size of partitions you are going to need for each section. Creating a Partition for Time Machine Time Machine needs a partition formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) File System.

The partition needs to be about twice the size of the amount of data you are backing up. Or to keep things simple twice the size of the hard drive you are backing up. If you have two Macs you want to back up using the WD My Passport hard drive then you could create two partitions of the right sizes and dedicate each partition to a particular Mac. Creating a Partition to Copy and Paste Files To You may need to take files with you to use on another Mac in a different location. Or your plan may be to simply free up space on your Mac by copying files you use less often off onto a separate drive. Or store files from a particular project on your My Passport external drive. Copy and Pasting, Drag and Drop to the external drive are all easy to do.

And you can have a partition on a larger drive dedicated to doing this. Note: If the only copy of these files is on the WD My Passport external drive you will need a backup of those files. Hard drives fail over time and the best practice is to have at least two copies on separate drives if not three copies of your data. Partitions used for copy, pasting, drag and drop are formatted to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) File System. Or if you have one of the latest Macs running Mac OS High Sierra, you can also format the partition to AFS (the new Apple File System). Both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) File System and AFS are only read and writable from a Mac.

Creating a Partition to Use between Mac and PC? A partition where you want to read and write files between a Mac and a PC needs to be formatted to. ExFAT is a file system format that is understood by both Mac and PC and when you plug in the WD My Passport that partition will be visible to both. The PC will not see or recognize partitions formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) File System or AFS.