Hey everybody Forest here and today we're going to look at how to format
an external hard drive, flash drive or any other type of external media
using macOS. Let's go ahead and dive in. So first off, very important disclaimer
formatting means erasing. So do not follow along in this video. If you are not willing to completely erase
whichever drive you decide to format. Step number 1 is going to be to open up a program called Disk
Utility on your computer. You can find this in the applications
fol
der, or just run a search for it
and go ahead and open it up. It does come
pre-installed on every Mac computer. Now once we're in Disk
Utility, you're going to get a list of all the internal
and external hard drives and flash drives that are currently connected
to your computer. One thing I like to do is go up to the view menu at the top
and go to show all devices. By default, I find Apple hides some really useful information
from us here that we're going
to want to have access to. Number
2, you
're going to want to make sure that you plug your drive,
whatever type it is, into your computer, and you should see it over here
on the left in the external section. I really recommend
only having 1 hard drive plugged in when you're formatting a drive, because you don't want
to inadvertently format the wrong one. So I like to safely remove
or eject all hard drives and then just plug in the one
that I'm looking to format. In this case, I'm
looking to format this Samsung SSD 870 EVO drive over he
re on the left. What I'm going to do is select the top level of the hard drive,
not the partition on it. And this is an important step
if you don't go view show all devices, you're actually not going to see
the top level. It's going to be hidden from you. And we really want to have access to that. So we're going to select the top level. Again. Be very careful what you select. That is
what's going to get formatted from here. On the top bar.
We're going to click the erase button. And we're going t
o get
a number of options. The first option we have is our name. Now depending on the format we choose next
the name can either be very open ended or we might be a little bit
more restricted with what we can choose. What I recommend is putting in
what you'd like to call the drive and then when we choose our other options, we may find that we have to rename it
slightly because it doesn't match the requirements of the specific format
we choose. I'm going to come in here
and just call this my main
photo drive. Now, when it comes to format,
we have a choice. I'm going to recommend
people pick one of four things either APFS, Mac OS Extended (Journaled) ExFAT or MS-DOS (FAT) depending on the use case, one of
these four options will be best for you. So I want to break it down like this. If you know that your device
is only ever going to be used on a mac and you want the best performance
on a mac computer, you're going to be choosing APFS
or Mac OS. Extended (Journaled). The difference is whet
her you're
formatting an SSD or a solid state drive or an HDD or a hard disk drive. Hard disk drives
have spinning, moving components inside them, while SSDs
are usually smaller, lighter, faster, and don't have any sort of moving parts
inside. If you're formatting an SSD for Mac use,
go with APFS. If you're formatting an HDD or hard disk
drive for Mac, use, go with MacOS Extended (Journaled). Both of those are optimized
for those specific use cases. Now, if you want to use the drive
with Macs or
PCs, we're going to go on and go with ExFAT
or MS-DOS (FAT). Now, I left some links in the description
because I think some people will want to do more
reading and exploration on this, but I'm going to break it down
fairly simply. MS-DOS (FAT)
is going to give you the most reliability and ease of use between Macs and PCs. The problem is, MS-DOS (FAT)
has some very big limitations in both the capacity of the hard drive
and the types of files we can put onto it, namely, the max file size with MS-
DOS
(FAT) is 4 GB and the maximum drive size is 2 TB. So if you're a videographer
and you're going to be commonly shooting files
that are over four gigabytes in size, MS-DOS
(FAT) is not going to work for you. However, if you're just using small files
like maybe documents, small photos, things like that,
and you have a smaller hard drive or flash drive and you want to use it
with both Mac and PC, MS-DOS (FAT)
is going to be your best choice. If you do want to use those larger files
or you have a
larger drive size,
you're going to want to go with ExFAT. But here's my warning to all of you. ExFAT tends to be very slow,
have low performance, and will sometimes corrupt your data
when switching between Mac and PC. So use it at your own risk. My recommendation would be
if you really want to use a drive on a mac and a PC, look at it as a temporary
transfer drive formatted as ExFAT, and use it as a way to get files from one
computer system over to the other. Computer system, but not a tool for
long
term storage on a PC. If you're looking for a drive to use
for long term storage, you're going to want to format it with NTFS, which is windows is format
that's best for hard drives. Same thing if you're on a mac and you're going to want to use something
for long term Mac storage. Like I said, you're going to want APFS
or MacOS Extended (Journaled) ExFAT should only be used for short
duration transfers between systems. Finally, if you are in an environment where Mac and PC use at the same
time is super important, maybe check out something like a Network
Attached Storage device or a NAS. A NAS is multi-platform by nature
because it lives on the network. PCs and Macs can access and NAS at
the same time with no loss of performance. And it's a really fast way to do things. So if that's important to you,
that can be a way to do it. One other solution is to format the drive
in APFS, MacOS Extended (Journaled) or on a PC as NTFS and download special
software on the other operating syste
m to allow it to read and write to a drive
that's not native to that system. Again, though, you might run into issues
down the line. To conclude, Mac folks, if it's an SSD
and you're going to use it on a Mac, go with APFS. If you're using a hard disk drive,
go with MacOS Extended (Journaled). Lastly, for the scheme, we're going
to want to choose GUID Partition Map. The only exception to
this would be Master Boot Record. In certain instances where you want the hard drive
to work on a very, very o
ld computer. For most
everything made in the last 10, 15, 20 years, Guid Partition
Map is going to be perfect. And this right here
is how I would set up my Disk Utility to format an SSD for Mac use only. I'm going to go ahead and click erase.
Let this run. I do want to point out
sometimes it will fail the first time. If that happens,
just run it a second time. It's no problem and it should finish
the process very easily. Again,
if you're interested in the whole Mac PC, what drive format is which
, check out
the links down in the description. Those might be helpful for you to learn
a little bit more about this process. Here we can see it has completed. I'm going to go ahead and click done. And now we have a properly formatted
SSD formatted in APFS which is perfect for the Mac environment. And lastly, leave a comment down below
if you have any questions. I'd love to help out in any way
that I can. You might want to consider bookmarking
this video or sharing it with a friend. This is one o
f those things I think is like a key thing that photographers,
videographers, creatives need. Every year or two. They get a new slew of hard drives. So it's a good kind of process to have
a quick reference to learn how to do. Thanks, everybody,
and I'll catch you in the next one.
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