How to format a drive on a Mac

How to format a drive on a Mac

There are all kinds of reasons why you might want to format a drive. Perhaps you are and you want to completely erase it so that nobody can access your date. Or perhaps you are setting up an external drive for backups. Maybe you want to copy something onto a drive to share with a PC or another Mac. Or it might be that you bought a drive to use with your Mac only to discovered it is pre-formatted for Windows. Fortunately Disk Utility, built right into MacOS, can help. And it's easy to use too. Read our roundup of the best storage devices available now: .Also take a look at . Before we begin there are a few things you need to know, including the most important decision of all, which format to use. We also have a tutorial on here. Other reasons you might want to use Disk Utility include and if you are . There are a few file formats that you can use but the one that's right for your circumstances depends very much on what you are going to be using the drive for. We'll describe them below, and you'll be able to choose the one that suits you. 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. There are a number of things that are good about it such as it being more efficient and more reliable. You can choose an encrypted version and a case-sensitive version. But it won't be readable or usable by a Mac that isn't running High Sierra, and Windows or Linux machines won't be able to read or write either. And it currently only works on SSDs or Flash storage. Read some of the . For now we'd advise against formatting in APFS because it won't be readable by Macs that aren't running High Sierra, but this may not matter to you. APFS replaced MacOS Extended as the default file system on the Mac when Apple launched High Sierra in 2017. If your Mac isn't updated to High Sierra it will offer MacOS Extended as the default. There's also the option of MacOS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) which is a good choice if you are likely to be carrying your laptop or external drive around and don't want anyone to access the contents of the drive should you accidentally lose it. 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. In FAT32's favour, it can be read and written by Mac, Linux Windows so you might want to use this if you regularly share drives with PC-owning friends or colleagues and want them to be able to access the files you place on the drive. However, its an older file system and files are limited to 4GB or smaller so it's not much use if you are copying movie files for example. FAT32 offers no security and it's more susceptible to disk errors. 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. This is Windows' default file system. MacOS can only read NTFS, it cant write to it. Although there are third party tools that could allow you to do so. Here's how to format a drive if you are planning to use it with a Mac. If you want to format a drive so that you can copy files between a Mac and a PC you'll want to follow the tutorial above, but choose ExFAT from the list of format options. We have a , but perhaps the big question in the context of this particular tutorial is which format to use. Time Machine still uses HFS+ (that's Mac OS Extended). If you have the option to format the drive you will be using for Time Machine using APFS don't. Time Machine can't currently use APFS.