Comparisons

Drive formats and search

Updated 2026-07-31 · 4 min read

The commonest cause of an unsearchable external drive is the format it shipped with.

Check what you have

Select the drive in Finder and press ⌘I. The Format line tells you.

The formats

Format	Mac read/write	Windows	Spotlight
APFS	Yes	No (without extra software)	Full
Mac OS Extended (HFS+)	Yes	No	Full
exFAT	Yes	Yes	Unreliable
FAT32	Yes	Yes	Unreliable, 4 GB file limit
NTFS	Read only	Yes	No

Why exFAT does not index well

exFAT has no support for extended attributes or the metadata Spotlight depends on. macOS can read and write files perfectly well; it just cannot store the index and metadata alongside them in the way indexing needs.

Drives ship exFAT because it works on both platforms out of the box. That convenience is exactly what costs you search.

Choosing

• Mac only — APFS. Best performance, full indexing, snapshots.
• Mac and Windows regularly — exFAT, and accept that search will be poor. A tool that

builds its own index rather than relying on Spotlight sidesteps this, since it reads filenames directly.

• Time Machine — APFS is required on recent macOS.
• Large media shared occasionally — exFAT, and use find when you need to search it.

Reformatting

Disk Utility → select the drive (not the volume) → Erase → choose APFS and GUID Partition Map. This destroys everything on the disk, so copy the data off first.

The workaround if you cannot reformat

find /Volumes/DriveName -iname "*term*" works on any format, because it reads directory entries rather than an index. Slower, and completely reliable.

Common questions

Can Windows read APFS drives?

Not natively. Third-party drivers exist, but exFAT remains the practical shared format.

Will reformatting to APFS make search work?

It allows Spotlight to index the drive properly. It also erases the drive, so back up first.