3. How to Format a Hard Drive on macOS (macOS Sierra or Earlier)

• How To Format An External Hard Drive For Mac Pro

The built-in disk manager tool on Mac Disk Utility can be used to format Mac hard drive without any other third party tools. If you've all set, follow steps below to format internal startup disk and Mac external hard drive, HDD, etc. on MacBook Pro/Air, iMac using Disk Utility. We emphasize once again before we get started that formatting hard drive for Mac and Windows PC will delete all these data on the drive.

You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. However, if you want to use the Mac to format your external hard drive to exFAT, you’ll face the problem that the external hard drive may not be compatible with the Windows PC. Thus, you’d better use the Windows machine to format your external hard drive. You can format an external hard drive or thumb drive to work seamlessly with both Mac and Windows by using the ExFAT file system. You can select the ExFAT format when using the Disk Utility to format the drive. The ExFAT format supports virtually any size hard drive and file, unlike the outdated FAT32 format. Possible Solutions to Format Hard Drive on Mac 1. How to Format External Hard Drive/Disk on Mac using Disk Utility? If you are using an external hard drive, or even an SD Card or a USB stick, make sure that it is properly connected to your computer via the appropriate port. How to Format an External Drive in OS X. Connect the drive to the Mac. Open Disk Utility. The easiest way to do that is hit CMD and the spacebar at the same time and type in Disk Utility to find the program. Select the drive you want to format. Mar 12, 2018  Want to format a hard drive for Mac and PC compatibility? You have to set it up correctly before getting starting. Mac OS Journaled is the formatting option for Mac and NTFS or MS-Doc is the. Oct 27, 2017  Now your external drive has been formatted to be fully compatible with Apple MacOS, and you can edit, read, and write files to it as you want. How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Mac. If you want to create multiple partitions on your external hard drive (in fact, you should for better file organization), here’s a step-by-step guide.

How To Format An External Hard Drive For Mac Pro

Step 1: If you want to format Mac external hard drive, connect the external hard drive you'd like to format to the computer. If you are going to format extra internal drive on Mac, you have to partition hard drive on Mac.
Step 2: Open Disk Utility by heading to Finder > Applications > Utilities and clicking on Disk Utility. You can add the Disk Utility to the Dock for quicker access.
Step 3: Select the external hard drive on the left-hand panel you want to format on Mac. You'll see the selected hard drive's info displayed.
Step 4: Click 'Erase' button at the top of the Window, and a window will pop up informing you that the erasing will wipe out all the current data on the drive.
Step 5: On the Erase window, enter a name, select OS X Extended (Journaled) format, and choose GUID Partition Map on the Scheme filed.
Step 6: Click 'Erase' tab to start erasing/formatting Mac hard drive. Now, you can use external drive on Mac to copy DVDs, movies, photos, videos etc.

At the beginning, the capacity of most external hard drives ranged from 120 GB to 250 GB but today the basic ones start with 1 TB at least. What you buy is what you end up with.While in a Windows desktop you can increase storage space by simply adding an additional internal hard drive, you can’t do that with a Mac. Good external hard drive for mac. Unlike a Windows desktop, however, you can’t customize the physical parts of a Mac machine. Hence, if you need extra storage capacity, you need to get an external hard drive.