In this video, I'm going to show you how to erase or format an external drive or USB stick. So it works on Mac. There's also the option where if you need that external drive to work on both Windows and Mac, but I'm going to cover all of the options that you need to know to format a flash drive, SSD and external drive. Any of those things. I'm going to talk about all the things in the video to come. My name's Javier Mercedes. I do video tech materials and gear reviews on this channel. Do you like that kind of stuff? Hit the subscribe button. Let's dive right into it to start off with. If you have any other external hard drives connected to your computer, I highly suggest ejecting them now. That way you don't make a mistake and format the wrong drive, which is something we do not want. In this example, I'm going to be using an 8 terabyte Seagate drive that I got off Amazon. But all the information I talk about is going to be applicable to thumb drives or whatever drive that you're using. When purchasing new external hard drives unless it says something on the box itself. By default, most drives come formatted for windows machines as dictated right here with his Windows NT file system or NTFS for short. Since this drive is formatted for windows, I can read it on this Mac, but I can't write to it. As you can see here, by this no circle symbol when I'm trying to drag a file onto the drive itself. Another common thing you'll see is maybe a software already installed on the hard drive itself that will help you format the drive for Mac. But we want to completely ignore this because I think it's safer to always format with the software that comes with your MAC operating system. And that software that I'm talking about is called Disk Utility to get to this. I normally just go up to the search bar and type in Disk Utility. This gives you an overview of the drive inside your computer as well as everything connected to your computer. At this point in time, select the drive that you want to format and I want to stress here that you do not want to be formatting your Macintosh HD. That's a completely different tutorial for different time because that's your internal hard drive. So with my Seagate external hard drive highlighted, I'm gonna go up to the word erase. Now I can rename my disk. What it's going to be after I'm done renaming. I'm gonna go down to format. And even though this is great out for me, I can still click on it. And now we have available the list of all the different ways that you can format this drive and really quick if you don't have all of these options available to you. Like with my Samsung T5 SSD, when I go to erase in hit format, I only have a select few options available to me. To fix this, one thing that may work for you going gonna cancel on this go up to view and we're only looking at the volumes inside the devices. So we're gonna go to show all devices. Notice that I was only clicking on the Samsung T5. So if I go to the highest drive in the hierarchy right here now, I go to erase and then I go to format. It still doesn't show all those options. What you would need to do is go to scheme in go to GUID partition map. And now if you were to go to format, you have all of the options available to you. Let me give you a brief summary of what you're looking at and then I'll dive into deeper detail for those that want to really know which format is best for you. APFS and Mac OS extended journaled will work on your Mac only MS-DOS is an older format, but it is compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac and ExFat is the one that you want to choose if you want to be compatible with Windows and Mac. But to explain these more so you understand which one is right for you at the top. We have APFS which stands for Apple File System. This is the newest file system from Apple and it comes after Mac OS Extended Journaled, which I'll get to a little bit later. But this format is perfect and completely optimized for SSD and little thumb stick drives. Basically any drive that doesn't have any moving components in it. This is not for external hard drives that have a magnetic spinning disk in it. So do not use this APFS with external hard drives that use a spinning disk. Use it for a little thumb stick drives an SSD. The reason being is because the way that it's set up, it's more stable in terms of combating data corruption. So say you got a bug or your power shut off completely. It would be able to recover those files better than some of the other formats on the list. And also, Apple says that this format is more focused on encryption. So if that's important to you, then definitely choose APFS. I did run a test of formatting the same thumb drive to APFS ExFat and Mac Extended Journaled and then I transferred the same nine hundred megabyte file from my computer's hard drive to that thumb drive. And what surprised me is that the older formats of Mac extended, journaled and ExFAT were actually much faster than APFS. So I believe in APFS copying files is actually faster when you do them internally on the drive itself, but from copying files drive to drive in the tests that I ran, Mac extended journaled and ExFAT was faster than using APFS. Now let me bring up a couple more caveats of why you would not want to use APFS number one. I'll just reiterate on spinning hard disks. You do not want to use this format to this format only works on MAC computers. Three of those Mac computers, they have to be running High Sierra or above. In order for the drive to get recognized, that's 10.13 so if you're using any computer below 10.13 this is not what you want to format your drive to. And one last one. I'm just going to read off Apple's own website. If you're preparing a time machine backup disk or a bootable installer, you should choose Mac OS extended journaled for any disk that you plan to use with time machine or for a bootable installer. The next format down the list is the predecessor to APFS and that's Mac OS extended journaled. This has been the proprietary file system for a very long time until APFS came along and for the most part it's safe to format your drive to this. If you are just going to be using MAC computers. So whether you have a hard disk, a flash drive or an SSD, whatever that may be, Mac OS Extended Journaled is going to work on that drive on your MAC operating system. And because my Seagate external hard drive has a spinning disk in it, I'm going to be choosing Mac OS extended journaled for this example. But let me explain the other options available to you. Next on the list is MS-DOS FAT. And this is compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac. But I'm just going to throw it out there. That's probably ninety nine point nine percent of you will not want to use this format, mainly because it has a cap at four gigabyte files, meaning that if you try and put a file on there that is larger than four gigabytes, it will not allow you to do that. So if this is a drive that you want to be compatible with both Windows and Mac, you're going to want to choose ExFAT. No, ExFAT isn't as efficient on Mac computers as something like APFS and Mac extended journaled. But obviously it has the huge advantage of being cross compatible for both reading and writing on Windows and Mac. So if that's something that is a must for you, then you're going to want to choose X fat and just to touch on case sensitive and encryption options with case sensitive. I really wouldn't suggest doing this unless you know what you're doing. But it's a way of looking at the file system. And if you were to put two files into folder, say one was labeled hit that like button starting with a lowercase h and another file was labeled hit that like button with an uppercase H, then it would see that as the same file name because it's not case sensitive. If you were to format the drive to be case sensitive, then it would see those as two separate files. But again, I don't suggest doing that unless you needed it for a specific purpose and you knew what you were doing. If you encrypt the drive, you'll have added security, but it may come at the cost of just a little bit slower performance because of that added security. Getting back to this example, I am going to use Mac OS X extended journaled because I have that spinning disk in my Seagate and you can go click on security options if you really wanted to prevent a disk recovery application from recovering the files after you've formatted it. But I've never used this drive before, so I'm not really concerned about that. So I'm going to hit OK and then erase. It will unmount, erase, and then remount your disk. I choose not to use it as a time machine backup. Hit done. And now I can see my relabeled Seagate five hard drive, its MAC OS extended journaled and there is a gigabyte and a half of information on there. But now this is compatible with my Mac computer, as I can show you by dropping this file onto the drive, something that I wasn't able to do in the beginning of the video when the drive was formatted to windows. Don't forget to leave me like on the video if this was helpful. Hit that subscribe button with notification bell if you like the way that I do my content. And I'll put a playlist on the screen right now that links to a whole bunch of other Mac OS tips and tricks until next episode. I hope you're out there living a life of abundance. Bye.
