Most external drives ship in formats that are universally recognised amongst nearly all operating systems (FAT, I’m looking at you), but there may be times where you might want to completely wipe a drive and/or set it up to be compatible with Apple’s Mac lineup only. Either way, you’ll want to format your drive accordingly. Formatting an external drive on your Mac is quite easy, though it isn’t as evident and obvious as it is on a PC. You can format a drive in OS X using two applications: Disk Utility and Terminal. We’ll be detailing both of these methods below. Formatting a Disk Using Disk Utility Formatting a disk using Apple’s Disk Utility is the easiest and most straight-forward method of the two. To format a disk using Apple’s Disk Utility, simply follow the steps below.
Open up Disk Utility on your Mac. You can either do this by searching for it from Spotlight or by navigating to “Applications - Utilities” and opening Disk Utility. Select the disk you want to format from the left-side pane. You’ll see the option to “Erase” the disk at the center – top of the window. Once you click on it, you’ll have the option to rename the disk, select the format you want for the disk (more on that later), and select the disk scheme. Once you have everything selected, simply click on Erase, and you’ll have a newly formatted disk. Formatting a Disk Using Terminal This method is aimed towards power users who are fond of using Terminal to do work on their Mac.
It is a little longer but often comes in useful when Disk Utility refuses to perform your desired action for some reason. To format an external disk using Terminal, simply follow the steps below: 1. Open Terminal, either by Spotlight or by opening the app from “Applications - Utilities.” 2. Enter the following command into Terminal.
External hard drives are not only useful for storing data but are an excellent way to transport files from one location to another. The downside is the hard drive only comes formatted for Windows and will need to be formatted before you can use it with your Mac.
Diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ diskname diskidentifier In the command above, change “JHFS+” to “ HFS+” if you want a volume that is not journalled. Change “diskname” to the new name you want for the disk, and replace “diskidentifier” to the Disk Identifier obtained from Disk Utility. If you want to reformat, replace eraseDisk with reformat and delete the “JHFS+” and “diskname” parts of the command. Use eraseDisk to erase the entire external disk, or eraseVolume if you just want to erase a particular partition. For example, I’d use “disk2s2” if I wanted to erase Untitled only in the example below: Once done, press Enter, and your disk should be erased and formatted completely. Disk Formats With Disk Utility, you have 3 main formats that you can erase your disk to. MS – DOS (FAT) MS-DOS (FAT) is the most popular format amongst external hard disks, as it’s both readable and writable by nearly all operating systems, Windows and OS X included.
One of the major limitations of this format is that it’s not able to write files larger than 4GB, which can be quite a setback. But apart from that, this will be the format you’ll want to use if you want a drive with cross-compatibility for quick transfers, or temporary storage. Most drives are formatted in MS – DOS (FAT) out of the box. ExFAT ExFAT is for those of you who are finding it hard to use FAT with all the limits, especially the large file transfer issue. ExFAT is basically an extension of FAT that allows for larger file sizes to be written and more.
Note that ExFAT is only compatible with versions of Windows later than Vista. OS X Extended OS X Extended is Mac’s native drive format. Your internal Macintosh drive is also formatted in this format. It’s recommended to use this format whenever you need to use an external drive with OS X only. One interesting feature of OS X Extended is that it is case-sensitive, i.e if you specifically name a file “BeachShot1,” OS X will see that file as different from a similar file named “beachshot1.” While formatting your disk to OS X Extended, you’ll have four main options:.
OS X Extended (Journaled). OS X Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled). OS X Extended (Journaled, Encrypted).
OS X Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted).
Summary: This article describes the ways to reformat external hard drive on mac without losing data. Why do I need to reformat external hard drive? External hard drive is useful that can be very convenient to help us to backup, store data and transfer files among computers. Which helps conserve storage space on your hard disk and move files quickly. But it is not always so fluent to move files between Mac and PC, namely, between macOS and Windows. The two different operation system have different default file system: the default file system on Windows is NTFS, while it is HFS+ or APFS on macOS. It should be noted that the HFS+ and APFS are not compatible with Windows and NTFS is read-only on macOS.
In order to make our external hard drive seamlessly work on both Mac and PC, we need to format our drive to a file system supported by both platforms, so the contents can be read on both platforms. Which file format should I use? You can choos a file format that's right for your circumstances based on the operating system and storage content you use frequently.
APFS (Apple File System) - This is the new file system that Apple bought to Macs with High Sierra and it will be the default if you are using that version of macOS. It is being more efficient and more reliable. But it won't be readable or usable by a Mac that isn't running High Sierra, and Windows won't be able to read or write either. MacOS Extended (also known as HFS+) - If your Mac isn't updated to High Sierra it will be the default file system on the Mac.
![Best Mac Os Format For External Hard Drive Best Mac Os Format For External Hard Drive](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125660436/806746331.png)
You can encrypt your drive and require a password to access it. There's also an option of MacOS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted) if you are likely to have file names that require capital letters. Windows can read HFS+ drives but can't write to them. However, It is a good choice if you are likely to reformat external hard disk and don't want anyone to access the contents of the drive should you accidentally lose it. NTFS - This is Windows' default file system.
MacOS can only read NTFS, it can't write to it. Cons: By default, NTFS is read-only on macOS. So read-only can't be a reason for us to give up using NTFS, especially when we have high requirements on transfer speed and performance of drives. MS-DOS FAT (aka FAT32) - it can be read and written by Mac, Linux and Windows, so if you ofter transfer files among windows and mac.
You might want to use this file system. Cons: It doesn't support files larger than 4GB, drive partition larger than 32GB on Windows, or drive partition larger than 2TB on macOS; FAT32 offers no security and it's more susceptible to disk errors. So FAT32 is suitable when we want to store files of relatively small sizes and the drive doesn't have a large capacity. Otherwise, FAT32 is not the best choice for us. ExFAT - this is similar to FAT32 above. Both Windows and Mac can read drives formatted with this. The main difference is it can store files over 4GB.
Cons: It is not compatible with older operating systems. We must have macOS 10.6.5 or newer, and PC need to be Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7 or newer. As most users have upgraded operating system, it is actually quite easy to meet to lowest operating system requirements of exFAT. So exFAT can be a very good option to share external hard drive between macOS and Windows.
Steps to reformat external hard drive mac Here's how to format an external hard drive if you are planning to format it with a Mac. Launch Disk Utility. Either head to Applications Utilities, or tap Command + Space and start typing Disk Utility. Once Disk Utility is open you'll see the list of available drives on the left. Choose the drive you'd like to format. NOTE that formatting your drive will erase the contents, so make sure you back it up first!
Click on the Erase option from the four options available in the main window. A panel will drop down, warning you that erasing the selected drive will destroy all data on the drive.
In the Erase panel, enter the new name for the volume you're about to create. And use the drop-down Format field to select from the following(Depending on the type of your disk, some options may not be displayed here.): - OS X Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) - OS X Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) - OS X Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted) - MS-DOS (FAT32) - ExFat To format a file format that can be used by both Windows and MacOS, you can choose MS-DOS (FAT32) or ExFat depending on the size of the data to be stored. If the disk is intended to be used exclusively with macOS, choose either the Extended or Journaled option. After you have made all of your selections, click the Erase button. Disk Utility will erase and format the selected drive, resulting in a single volume being created and mounted on your Mac's desktop.
Click the Done button. This is the main step in formatting a drive using Disk Utility. Congratulations, your external hard drive is now erased, reformatted and ready to be used. We all know that if it is not backed up in time formatting any disk can lose data from it. If we lost data from the reformat external hard disk, we should find a way to recover data from it. How to recover data from reformat external hard disk? When you want to recover data, Close all programs that might access or use the formatted external hard drive and do not reformat it any more.
Because If you format the hard drive more than once, the operating system will create new file system for each formatting. All these cause data overwrite. Then use Bitwar Data Recovery for Mac to recover the lost data as soon as possible. Install the Bitwar Data Recovery for Mac? Download Bitwar Data Recovery for Mac by clicking below download icons.
Then install it on your Mac OS X. The software is compatible with OS X 10.11 and later. Related Articles - ALSO ON Bitwar SOFTWARE. When we plug external hard drive in a Mac OS computer, it suddenly fails to show up. How can we fix 'USB flash drive not. Your computer suddenly restarts or shuts down before saving the Word, Excel or PowerPoint file.
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