The Mac also offers the option of choosing other file systems when formatting a USB drive, but most users will want to stick with Mac OS Extended. Once the USB drive is formatted on your Mac, you can use it for whatever purpose you like, be it a Time Machine backup drive, a destination for manual file backups, extra storage space, running an operating system directly from it, or anything else you can think of. Once you have finished, click “ Done” and put your drive to use Be patient until Disk Utility finishes erasing the drive – it may either be very quick or take some time, depending on the type of disk. From the left sidebar, select the USB drive you wish to format
From /Applications/Utilities/ or through Spotlight search, open Disk Utility on your Mac To start, make sure the USB drive is connected to the Mac If you format a drive to make it natively compatible with MacOS, everything on the drive will be deleted. In this article, we will help you format a USB drive on Mac. If your USB drive is a USB hard drive, USB flash drive, SSD, key, thumb drive, or otherwise, or whether it is USB-C or USB-A, you can format and erase it the same way.Īttempting to format a drive will erase all data on it, so if you wish to retain your data, this is not a good idea.
Well, don’t fret, it’s not a big deal, since you can easily format a USB drive to work on a Mac. The majority of hard drives and USB drives you buy, even those for a Mac, come pre-formatted using Windows-friendly formats like exFAT or FAT32, rather than Mac-friendly file systems like HFS+. Any changes you make on files on this system is permanent.Don’t we all rely on storage devices and USB drives, such as hard drives or flash drives, to transfer large files or create backup copies? The only drawback of exFAT is that it doesn’t support Journaling, i.e., cannot keep track of file changes. You can have a maximum of 4GB size limit per file which is not ideal. Now you can plug into any OS – even Linux, and it will work in reading and write mode. You might argue why not use FAT32 which works for both the OS’s. Click Start and close this window when finished.In the File System dropdown, choose exFAT.Open up File Explorer and right-click on the drive.Plug-in your drive into the computer’s USB port.After these steps, everything will be lost forever. It is where exFAT or Extended File Allocation Table comes into the picture. If you don’t know, exFAT was created to be used on flash drives like USB or SD cards. So the question is how do you format a hard drive using exFAT? The answer is even more straightforward.īefore we go ahead, if you have anything on your drive, make sure to backup everything. So I needed a format which is both read and write on both the systems. I am the kind of person who needs to switch between both the OS daily.
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