Format external hard drive to NTFS file system.Īlthough the NTFS file system is developed by Microsoft, macOS can only read NTFS external hard drive and cannot write NTFS external hard drive, you need to install an extra NTFS for Mac app if you want to write NTFS external hard drive on Mac. Format external hard drive to FAT32/exFAT file system.Īlthough FAT32/exFAT file system is developed by Microsoft, macOS can also read/write external hard drives with FAT32/exFAT file system.Ģ. How to format external hard drive for Mac and Windows PC usage?ġ. How to password protect external hard drive for Mac and Windows PC usage? How to format external hard drive for Mac and Windows PC usage? If someone just wants to destroy the data, they can just damage the drive. If you want to prevent people from destroying the data on the drive, you need to keep it physically secured anyway. It will however not prevent someone from formatting the drive. This is reasonably cross-platform, usable and secure. If you want to prevent others from reading or manipulating the data, encryption (specifically full disk encryption / FDE) is the way to go, e.g. Other than that, I don't believe there is a solution to your problem. Finally, it can be defeated using special software (or hardware tinkering) on most drives (though this can be tricky).

Also I'm not sure it will work with removable drives, and I believe Serial ATA does not have it.

However I would rather advise against this: This feature of ATA is seldom used, and you need special software on the host computer to use it (which in turn normally needs admin privileges to install on the host computer). If the disk is password-protected, you need the password to unlock it before it can be accessed. The PATA spec allows setting a hard drive password: The only way I can see to make this possible is to use the password protection mechanisms of Parallel ATA (aka IDE).

Password protected external hard drive