Since external hard drive might be used on many computers, it tends to infect virus. Formatting can clear data fragmentation quickly and easily. This is a good solution to delete data and free up disk space. Quick formatting is able to format a partition within seconds, and all data on the volume will be deleted. To quickly remove content from external hard drive.To change file system type, formatting should be done. The brand-new disk you purchase might not be formatted to the file system type you need. Format external hard drive to required file system.Still many users would like to format the external hard drives and people do that due to various reasons: To format a drive on a Mac, you’ll need the built-in Disk Utility application.Ī brand-new external hard drive is usually partitioned into s single partition with NTFS file system. Again, formatting a drive will erase it completely, so make sure you have everything backed up that you want to keep. If you want to use a different file system on your USB drive, you’ll need to “format” it.
For instance, is the hard drive internal or external? Geek 101: How to format a Mac hard drive. How you format a Mac hard drive is entirely dependent on what kind of drive you plan on formatting. If you have a Mac lying around, you can plug the drive into a Mac and back up the files. Instead, we’ll just be wiping the drive and starting over from scratch. This process won’t actually convert the file system. First, back up the data on the Mac-formatted drive if you have anything important on it. The other formats - Microsoft's NTFS and Apple's Mac OS Extended - don't work well on the other operating system. To share a USB drive between a Mac and a Windows PC, there are two disk formats to choose from: exFAT and FAT32.