You can cut down load times on a MacBook by adding a solid-state disk drive to the system; however, the drive won't do you any good unless it is formatted correctly for Mac OS. The only difference between a Mac hard drive and a PC hard drive is what file system it's formatted in; Mac hard drives usually come formatted in FAT32, which will work on both Macs and PCs, but isn't optimal for the MacBook's operating system. PC formatted hard drives use the NTFS file system and need to be reformatted to work with Mac computers. Tips. External SSDs can be connected using USB or Thunderbolt connection while internal SSDs can be connected to the Macbook using external enclosures or as a secondary drive inside a optical-drive-to-hard-drive mount in models with an optical drive. MacBooks that do not have an optical drive bay either need to swap out the old hard drive for the SSD or use an external enclosure. The MacBook will have to sacrifice using the optical drive to use the second hard drive.
Option 1: Format to NTFS, and use NTFS-3G to read/write on Mac. If you keep your hard drive's out-of-the-box NTFS format for all the reasons FAT32 displeases, there's a workaround that will allow.
If you are swapping out the hard drive for the SSD, Mac OS X will format the drive as a part of the operating system reinstallation process. Installing an internal SSD involves taking apart the MacBook. Only Mac OS X running systems can read the HFS+/Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format and only Windows running systems can read the NTFS format without installing non-native drivers.
However, both Macs and PCs can read the FAT32 and ExFAT file systems.
Hi Robert, The NTFS file system provides better performance and security for data on hard disks. You can try the following steps to convert the hard disk to NTFS format. Press Windows key + X and select Command prompt(admin).
At the command prompt, type convert driveletter: /fs:ntfs, where driveletter is the letter of the drive you want to convert, and then press Enter. For example, convert E: /fs:ntfs would convert drive E to the NTFS format. Type the name of the volume you want to convert, and then press Enter.
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You must use the existing name of the volume or the conversion will be canceled. You can view all available volumes in the Computer folder under Hard Disk Drives. Restart the computer. Note: After you convert a partition to NTFS, you cannot convert it back.
Although the chance of corruption or data loss during a conversion is minimal, you should back up all data on the partition before you begin. Hope this helps.