How To Format an External Hard Drive for Mac - Everything You Need To Know

Thank you so much, Javier! Your explanation was simple enough for someone like me, who did not even know the disk utility app existed before your video! We bought the hard drive to back up our wedding photos! Now we have them! Thank you! I also feel like I can apply what I learned to something else in the future. You are awesome!

in what format i need to play music in my car, with my flash drive>?

Thank you

My favorite short simple explanation video. Been watching this for 3 years now 😂 thank you 🙏🏽.

hi is it possible to reformat a drive with data already on it or only empty ones?

Thank you. The tip to select view was terrific. I could not figure where my TimeMachine segment was hiding! Great communications - no jargon and good examples.

very helpful, thank you

Hello Javier. Thank you for a very informative video, but I have one question. I have a spinning hard drive currently connected to my old iMac (mid 2010) for Time Machine, named Time Machine High Sierra. I have a newer iMac now (mid 2022) running Sonoma 14.0 that I wish to place that hard drive onto for its Time Machine purposes. Do I connect the hard drive to the new Mac to erase it and rename it, or do I do that process with it on the old Mac first and then eject it and attach it to the new Mac? Thank you!

thank you for your help

EXCELLENT teaching ... Thank You ..... ;-)

what do I do if the operation still fails after all that? Any suggestions?

An important note - even if a drive is ejected they can still be formatted. The only way to prevent accidentally formatting the wrong drive is to physically disconnect them.

Super helpful thanks

A very thorough, and excellent video Javier...Thank you for your time.

i want to delete seperate file from my harddisk i don’t want to format everything tell me how ?

Thank you! I loved this video and it was super helpful. I was surprised that my new Toshiba external drive had no further information as to how to format. Your video was fantastic. Great energy!

Good job!

Thank you so much!! I was going crazy trying to get it to work for me, but your explanation was easy to follow and straight to the point! Thanks again

This information is out of date as far as NTFS. MAC and IPAD can now read and write NTFS.

This is 8-15-2023 and Apple no longer supports exfat for both Mac and Windows.

by far the best explained video for what I needed to know. thank you immensely

super helpful! thank you for the video :)

Wow Brilliant. As a 74 yr old. It was clear and i followed sate by stage. The information re the various options super. Thanks a million.

So it’s a pain compared to a ‘normal’ laptop

Simple but thorough explanation - THANK YOU!

You saved me ❤❤❤❤

I was just going to say that it’s the easiest and the most comprehensive explanation, without any BS information I don’t need, but someone beat me to it. Dude! I finally just started backing up my photos from the phone. It was so freaking painful to shoot a video only if you have anything to erase to free up some space. Thank you so much!

The Mac disk utility doesn't provide any options on how to select the cluster size. Not even from the terminal. The default cluster size is way too big for exfat. Mac OS has way too many very small files that quickly will fill up an exfat drive because the smallest exfat cluster size is 128K. So a 1K file still takes up 128K of space. If you want to format a USB with exfat use Windows. Windows format allows one to chose the sector size to a more reasonable 1K.

Most Mac system apps are just a front end to a command line command. diskutil can be run from the command line and provided more options but diskutil is not a unix/linux like command that I am looking for. On linux I use mkfs.

I have noticed the issues with having case-sensitive with names conflicting..is there a way to switch from MAC OS case-sensitive extended Journaled to normal MAC OS extended without losing everything?

For people using both mac os and windows. Do you know what is the best option between exFat and NTFS format? I tend to believe it's NTFS, but I don't know how are things speedwise when transferring files.
I've heard that exFat is very sensible to not properly unmounting the drive (that is you may lose your data if the drive is not ejected properly, a bad cable or a power failure if you are not connected on a UPS).
You need a windows pc to format NTFS. Then NTFS can be read and written in mac OS using a software like Tuxera ntfs...

Brilliant video, clearly explains everything, and had the EXACT info I needed at the right moment to stop me doing the wrong format for a Time Machine SSD. Wish more videos were this good and clear!

I have a Samsung T7 1TB SSD that I bought for my iPhone and it is easy to transfer photos and videos to the T7 but it doesn’t save my Live Photos as Live Photos…so when I redownload the photo to my iPhone to use it is no longer live and I was wondering if there is a way around that and if I can somehow save my Live Photos as Live Photos?

Bless you for making this straight to the point and breaking this down as welll. I’m particularly having an issues with connecting the Samsung SSD 1TB to my iPhone 14 after formatting it to Mac OS (journaled). Any advice? To note it connects perfectly to my IPhone 11 Pro Max.

legit needed thank you

Super helpful video! Thanks for making this !!

This video saved my life!!! I've had a seagate hard drive sitting aorund doing nothing for a year because I couldn't figure out how to get it to work on my mac laptop! I finally decided to tackle the issue again and was searching around and finally came across your video. THANK YOU!!!

Your time and expertise are much appreciated! You're a great communicator/instructor!

Best explanation I’ve seen online on how to fix a flash drive to work on Mac and it was extremely helpful .

the most straightforward and helpful video!!! thank you for getting straight to it and explaining everything for a beginner

Which is the best and secure external SSD drive format for Mac and PC because I heard that if we are using exFAT drive format the files are getting corrupted.

YOU SAVED MY LIFE. Thank you man!! Best explanation ever.

So helpful! 👍🏾

Bless you, brother! What a head ache this morning! Thank you!

Great video. What I liked most was that you didn't talk about irrelevant things and you didn't talk slowly. I get frustrated when it takes forever to get the information you need. Loved it.

THANKS, MAN!!!!! Way to talk to the "non"techies!

Great one👌
I really was searching for which one of formats is good for me, so with your explanation I found it very simple.
Thanks

I have a question I’m looking into switching to a Mac book for my music and video software that’s 1tb+ with sounds and plugins would the external hard drive be good to hold all that storage ?

I get discouraged because some videos say an external won’t do me justice.

Thanks for the video. Question: what about if I already have information save to the external memory, if I format it using the erase will I loose the information?

Great help ‼️