And make sure that you don't close the Disk Utility before the process finishes. But if you are formatting a big size hard drive, then the process might take longer than you expect. If you are formatting a small flash drive or USB drive, the process will complete quickly. As you press the Erase button, everything on the drive will be deleted completely.

Change the name of the drive if you want to and finally tap on the Erase option at the bottom of the interface.Ī popup window will appear and ask you to confirm the action.Choose the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) option. Now switch to the Erase tab and click on the Format drag-down menu.Locate the drive from the left side panel of Disk Utility and open it.Connect the hard drive or USB with Mac and open Disk Utility from Applications.The same procedure is followed for all other storage devices too.

So, here is the process by which you can format hard drive or USB for Mac. So, from here on, reformat will be considered as a format. It is considered as a better process as it is comparatively easy to format the drive for Mac instead of removing files which are malfunctioning. It allows the users to reinstall OS and all other software once the format is complete. Technically, when you want to switch a USB or hard drive system to another OS, it is termed as reformatting. Now you can understand that there are several benefits of formatting a drive. Thus, formatting the USB drive or external hard drive will get rid of any software conflict that you are facing and even glitches will disappear.

To remove all kinds of viruses and malware, formatting works more effectively than deleting the files.

To improve the performance of the drive, frequent formatting is essential.

Thus, formatting the drive and deleting the previous system files and settings is vital. Using another OS-compatible drive can make your OS vulnerable to viruses, malware, and other malfunctions. But formatting will erase the binary data too. Simply erasing the data leaves a binary print on the drive.

To remove the data from a USB drive or any other drive completely.

Here are some other factors that will conclude that formatting the external drive with Mac is necessary as it will also improve the performance of the drive. Unless you intend to use the drive for file exchange between Windows and Mac, the formatting would be the right thing to do. But unless you format the drive on Mac, it can't be used as a bootable disk or with Time Machine. It is possible to read and write on a drive that has a different file system. But if you want to ensure that the drive has complete Mac compatibility, then you'll have to format the drive using the Mac OS Extended filesystem. It is done as a routine maintenance task. Overview of Formatting Drive on Macįormatting isn't just a process of erasing the existing data on a drive. The Best Format Choice of External Drive on Mac

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