How to Format External SSD on macOS Big Sur

[Music] hey guys on today's video we're gonna be setting up your external hard drive or external ssd same deal same instructions so let's just get started right away on the top right hand corner of your screen you're gonna see this this is for your spotlight search just click on it once you click on it start typing up disk utility once you guys see this utility just open it up which by the way some of you may have it down here below as well so just open up disk utility so once we open up this utility you might see something like so this is perfect so what we have to do in this case before we get started with anything that is is go up here and you will see view just click on this icon what i need you to choose is show all devices so click on show all devices that's the very first step once we choose to show all devices we're going to see this don't touch anything that says internal so what we're going to do is just click up here okay to get rid of internal because we don't want to see anything that's internal and down here you might see external so make sure you open this up external just see that arrow here on the right hand side just make sure you see that you might see two right here or you might even see more partitions it doesn't really matter now remember what we're going to do is format formatting will erase the entire content within the external hard drive so this setup is usually for new external hard drives however if you're having problems making it work on your mac you still need to properly format it which again will delete everything from within the external hard drive or external ssd so i also want to highlight that it doesn't really matter which brand you guys have it could be a seagate wd anything really it's going to be the exact same instructions and that's because the software that you might have inside that external hard drive will cause you most likely problems later on and that's why we get rid of any files that are already inside the external hard drive or external ssd that you just got because every time i deal with the problems from anybody is because they install that software it's no longer up to date it doesn't work with their mac because maybe you just updated your mac and the program is no longer compatible with the new mac os so at this point just think of your external hard drive or external ssd like a usb stick you can just drag and drop stuff into it and you can also set up time machine to backup your entire mac which is something that's already installed on your mac so might as well take advantage of everything that your mac has and that way you do not need to install and download any software for your external hard drive or external ssd to work so right now we're gonna get started on the top right hand corner of your screen you will see erase under disk utility so erase again will delete everything so we're going to click on erase so once we click on erase we're going to see this option down here below so i'm going to see this here so you can format it in many ways and right now you can name it as well so what i want to name this for now is just external hdd no ssd i guess same thing it doesn't really matter what you guys name it it could be your own name then from here this is the important part what we have to choose so you're gonna have quite a few options down here below and you might even see a few more options than me in this case which is perfect actually and what we want to do is choose if you just want it to work for mac just choose extended journaled that's the choice that you want to make now if you want this to work with mac and pc so if you want to plug it into any windows machine and work then what you want to go for is exfat xfad will take care of that so you can transfer files between your mac here and any pc now let's say you're having problems with older pcs or maybe you want to set this up for your tv or anything like that you might have to choose this which is actually the worst format but some tvs they're pretty old and they only take this type of format so it really does depend what you want your external hard drive to do most likely you will want to transfer files between your mac and other pcs and not just between macs so we're going to format it as exfat first so let's just choose that we're just going to name this as so now this is pretty important as well it should say partition and i'm going to teach you why you should say partition and not master boot now this can also be a problem if you're formatting this for your tv you should actually try this format master and not partition because partition could have problems if you're formatting this for your tv but again right now we're doing this to transfer information between macs and pcs and even between macs because this works regardless with everything so we're just going to go in partition now before i press erase if this is an older external hard drive or external ssd then you might want to go into security options which is in the bottom left hand side i'm just going to show you that and you're going to see this and this is just in case you want to maybe sell your external hard drive or external ssd then you would at least take it up to here for fast or here or if you have really sensitive information go up to the most secure if you're formatting this way by the way it's gonna take you forever it's to take you a very long time if this is your initial setup you don't really have to worry about this just leave this as is press ok and you're good to go again if you're brand new you're just setting up this for the first time you don't even have to go into security options you're just fine we're just going to press on erase so we're going to go ahead on the bottom right hand side press erase once we do that we should see this and it should be done yeah so don't worry about it if it takes you a little bit longer than for me this is an external ssd so it's a little bit faster than external hard drive however for most of you since it's brand new it will not take that long regardless so we're just going to press undone and at this point in time if you wanted this to work just to transfer files between your mac and another windows pc you're basically done and i don't need to show you anything more however i am going to show you time machine if you want to back up your entire mac and other options as well but let's say you're done in your desktop you might even see this now see this icon that's exactly what i named my external so i can open this up so right now it's open and i can drag and drop stuff into here so let's say i created a file here on my mac like this folder so i opened it up i can just drag and drop it in there so that's how easy it is with external hard drives it would be exactly like a usb stick you can just drag and drop stuff into it or copy and paste stuff into your external hard drive in order to transfer it to another computer or just to have it as a backup for now i'm just going to close this up though and at this point in time i also want to highlight if you're having any problems you're getting any errors just try again format it again or you guys see right here says external make sure to open this up so you should see an arrow here just make sure to open it up and you're going to see two options select the second option once you select that second option format that option so again do that if you're having any problems and only format that particular option and then it should work and you shouldn't get any further errors also if you're getting any errors try formatting as journaled although you might format it as exfat in the end format it as journaled first i'm actually even going to show you that right now because we're going to do some partition work so you guys can see exactly all the power that your star hard drive has so we're going to go on and select the first option again and in this case we're going to go on the top and we're going to select partition again if you're having any problems with partition just make sure to select the correct options and format this journal first if you're having any problems right now we have it formatted as exfat which doesn't matter we're just going to partition this right now so let's go ahead and partition so what does partition do well let me just show you this is very graphic so that's the good thing about this so right now i have one partition and that means it's only one external hard drive right so i can divide this into parts and this is great if you want to keep certain parts for maybe just for pc and mac other parts that you just want for your documents that only other macs can read only your mac can read so we're going to go ahead and click on format we're going to choose journal and then from here once you select journaled you're going to see this plus sign available so it's very important to choose journal first and click on that plus sign what did that do that brought up my external hard drive to be partitioning into two so it's kind of like having two external hard drives right now or two external ssds which is awesome so right now this external right here has 500 gigs and this other one has another 500 because it split it up in the middle now we can give one more than the other but for now what i'm going to name this so we don't get confused is name this pc and mac because this format was exfat now this is just for you guys to know what's happening i'm also going to name it exfat just to make it very very clear what's going on now once i do that i can actually bring up or bring it down so to do that i can go ahead and just click here and move this around so i'm giving this partition less space because i maybe i don't want to transfer that much information or i know i'm gonna not transfer too much information between macs and pcs i'm just going to transfer some information so maybe i don't want to give it that much space maybe i just want all this space to be for documents and backups so i'm going to leave that as is i'm going to click where it says here just anywhere here actually and then it's going to highlight this portion and from here i'm just going to name this time machine that's because i'm going to teach you what time machine is you don't need to name it like that you can animate backup if you like and i'm going to show you what time machine can do for your mac to back up your entire mac that means your files your programs your mac os everything so we're just going to up click on apply for now now again you should get a warning like so because partitioning also erases everything with any external hard drive for external ssd so if you want to change your partition size later on you really can't because you will have to erase everything from within it again so although you could but again you're erasing everything again so make sure to choose the right size right now so we're going to go ahead and click on partition so really think about how much space you want to leave for a backup for your entire mac and space as well just to transfer files between your mac and a pc for example or just between macs that's why i suggest just doing it as exfat so that way you're free to do whatever you like and running just the other part which is time machine which um actually time machine cannot be read by pcs your time machine backup will actually only be able to be read by other macs so let's say you buy another macbook or you upgrade or maybe your mac crashes you can always take that time machine backup plug it into your new mac and transfer everything over and yes it's going to transfer your files photos any videos that you guys had music any apps that you guys had installed on this mac as well and it does include your mac os so right now it's done so i'm just going to click undone and i'm going to show you what just happened so the best way to show you what it just happened is showing you this right here on my desktop so right now i have it's almost like having two external hard drives because i have one right here which is pc and mac exfat that's just transfer information between them and then i have time machine which will be my backup for my entire mac now before i keep going to show you time machine and all that stuff if you just want your external ssd or external hard drive just to work with max or between macs all you have to do is not even partition anything just format it as journaled okay and that's all you would do now let's keep going we're gonna go and look for your system preferences that's down here below for most of you if you don't see it again on the top right hand side of your screen you're gonna see your spotlight search so just click on that spotlight search and in your spotlight search i want you to type up system preferences just open that up and for now i'm just gonna close this utility because we don't need it anymore however under system preferences we're gonna go into time machine time machine will be down here just beside sharing in between startup disk or if you're running older mac os it could be somewhere else but you're going to have to have it there anyways because it's something built into your mac already so click on time machine and here's my time machine so i already have a time machine set up and that's why you guys see this but for most of you will not see anything here you're just going to see select disk so that's actually what we're going to do we're just going to click on select disk and you might want to have a check mark there but for now i'm going to actually leave that off just because i don't want to do the backup right away what i want to do is just select my disk and at this time i do have this option here time machine which is the one that we just formatted we also have pc and mac exfat but i suggest just setting this one up so we're gonna click right there we're gonna use disk well right now i have another external hard drive which has a backup of my mac that's what i'm getting this message and i'm just going to choose use both but most of you will not get that message unless you already have this set up with another external hard drive so right now what i have here is this added and this is the time machine that we just set up so what i suggest doing for most of you is just having a check mark here just back up automatically so make sure to turn that on and what will this do is that any time that your external hard drive for external ssd is plugged into your mac and turned on it's just going to run that backup for you if you don't want it to do that if you want to back it up yourself then don't have a check mark there just leave that off but it's very important down here below in the menu to show time machine in the menu bar and that way you're gonna see this up here so here's my menu bar i'm gonna see time machine all the way up here so you might see a clock that's your time machine so click on that time machine and we're going to see these options so we can enter time machine and we can back up now so if you want to manually back up your mac just go into backup now it's just going to start backing it up so yes this will back up your entire system your entire mac so all your apps everything everything that you got in here it's gonna back it up so that's what's really good about this so does this mean you have to have your external ssd or external hard drive plugged into your mac the entire time like every single day all day no you can back you can back it up whenever you want you can plug it into your mac whenever you like to do that backup if you want to run a backup i personally have it always plugged in and always running a backup so that way for example right here my last backup was done at 11am so my next backup might be done at 2pm so if maybe later on maybe tomorrow i uh deleted something and then i'm like oh oops i actually deleted something i didn't mean to delete uh yesterday and i really want that back well i have a backup of that i can actually enter time machine and go through all my files to see that so i'm going to show you that in just a second but before i show you that i do want to show you this as well since we made that change with our time machine you may have seen this changing color so you might have this pc and mac and right now you might have your time machine set up like so so it's going to look a little bit different than before now what i did right now is plug in my other external hard drive and that's because i want to show you because i already have a time machine backup of my tire mac i want to show you how this time machine thing works so you know exactly what you're doing now again when it comes down to time machine if you buy a new macbook and other imac and you want to transfer all your files you can just plug in your external hard drive to that new mac and when you're setting it up you can actually just choose time machine to transfer everything over and that way everything will just automatically transfer you don't do really anything yourself for now so we don't get confused since i plugged in another external hard drive i'm just going to move this to the side and here is my time machine that i had set up from before and there's a lot of stuff in there so what i'm gonna do is just enter my time machine just to show you how it works so if i want to retrieve something maybe i deleted something yesterday or a few days ago and i kind of remember the date and where it was so i can go on and retrieve that so what i'm going to do is click on my time machine i'm going to enter time machine it should take me to this window right here so why is it taking me to my desktop well it says desktop here because that's where i'm at at the moment and it's gonna look through any dates so see this on the side where it says december november february i can go into my desktop how it was back in let's say friday december the 4th let's click there it's going to take me all the way back to what was in my desktop on that day so i can see i actually had a lot of stuff in my desktop back then so let's say i deleted this screenshot by accident i really want it back so i can click on it then i can go down here below where it says restore click on restore and that's going to bring it back into this desktop so see how it just popped up here so although it was deleted long time ago i can still retrieve that file and that's really great about time machine but anyways i don't really need that file that was just to show you guys an example it's not just with your desktop you guys can go into documents or anywhere else so it doesn't really matter where you guys put in your document you could go into that section so maybe it's all in your documents maybe it's in your movies anywhere there you can go back in time and retrieve those files plus hey if your mac ever crashes or anything happens to it you can plug in that external hard drive external ssd to a new mac and transfer everything over and by the way if you're wondering how that works i already have videos showing you guys in my youtube channel how to transfer everything from one mac to another and i'm always showing you how to do that using time machine mix it's so so easy anyways i just disconnected external hard drive that i had from before and now i have the original one that i was showing you how to set up so here's my time machine part of it and here on the other side what i did was place this so this is the one that i can click into and just drag and drop any files into this space or i can even make folders inside of it such as this one right here and have any information inside that partition so that's what it comes down to partitions it's really great and you can have a lot of partitions happening at the same time depending how do you want to split up your information now what i'm going to do is go back to disk utility just to show you one more thing so under disk utility i'm just going to close this up and i have a lot of stuff happening here so don't mind that guys and that's because we did our partitions so here's our first partition here's the second one so if we close this one up this is the main one so i don't need to open that up so again if you guys don't see all your partitions and everything it would be under external and you don't have to click on that arrow once you click on that arrow you're going to see everything that you got right now under your partitions so i can click on my pc partition or i can click on my time machine anytime i want to erase everything from within it i can just go on and format it again just by pressing erase now remember usually what i recommend having your time machine partition as the biggest one because that means it's gonna do a better backup of everything and more backups of everything so let's say you have in your mac about 200 gigs of files in total then i would suggest having your time machine partitioned to be at least at the very least 400 gigs so maybe double the size so that way we can guarantee that you have a pretty good backup of your files now when it comes down to any other partitions well it's up to you another question i get is can i partition or change the size later on well if we do that let me show you i'm gonna click on partition right now if i try to do that at this point in time i am risking stuff and i might be erasing other stuff so what do i mean by that well let's say i just want to format this right here i can i could actually do that and my time machine will not be affected at all however it might so i would never never never format anything any partition if i didn't want to risk the other partitions and by risk i mean erasing all of them as well so make sure your very first setup your very first format is the one that you want to go on forever until you guys would like to get rid of all the information from your external ssd or external hard drive and also if you just bought an external ssd or external hard drive because your mac is running out of space and you want to keep information there it's no longer a backup if you're just keeping your information in just one place in your external ssd or external hard drive that just makes it one copy and you don't really have a backup so i would suggest getting two external hard drives to have an actual backup plus your files into one thing so what i would recommend is actually getting two external ssds or two external hard drives in order to have an actual backup of your files because hey external hard drive external ssds do fail and if you don't eject them for example before you unplug them from your mac things can happen so and things happen all the time i have a video how to try to fix those problems when that happens because a lot of people just unplug the external hard drive or external ssd from their mac without ejecting it and that can cause huge issues so before we end that video i'm going to show you how to eject your external hard drive so yes from this utility we have this right here which we'll eject so on the right hand side see this here just pressing the first one it's going to eject it but no you don't really have to do this every single time you plug in your external hard drive code to your disk utility what you have to do is actually just right click on your external hard drive to eject it so what we have to do before we unplug it from our mac maybe we we are done we can go ahead and just right click on it and choose eject so before you unplug your external hard drive from your mac always always eject we're gonna do that right now for example it's gonna ask me do i want to eject all yes because you want to eject your time machine since we have two partitions so we're gonna go ahead and eject they should disappear from my desktop i shouldn't see them anywhere and right now and only right now can i unplug them from my mac it's gonna be safe so that's how to eject your external hard drive from your mac safely another question i get sometimes is that your time machine never turned any other color don't worry about it if it's still yellow like this one here it's not really a problem it just happens i'm not really sure why that happens but uh with some people that happens and i did have an external hard drive before where it just stayed yellow and never turned to this type of icon again not a big deal now let's say you would like to re-partition your external hard drive there's only one way to do that and that's by erasing everything so as long as you guys plug in your external hard drive go into this utility once again which if you don't find it just go into your spotlight search on the top right hand side of your screen and you're just gonna type in disk utility like so and just open it up we are gonna select the second option so under internal never touch internal going to external you're gonna see this also make sure to always have show all so once we do that and we have that we can go on into eras and we can erase everything and yes this will erase everything that's the only way we can repartition our external hard drives so make one partition bigger than the other or just move stuff around so in this case we're going to choose journal because this will work just with max and i have a lot of people that just want the external hard drive to work with mac so journal is perfect so we can go on into erase now our first erase will just make one huge partition and then we're going to split it up so i always suggest doing this just in case you made a mistake and you want to do this again yes you can go on and reposition everything so you can set up different sizes for every single thing that you would like so if you want your time machine to be a little bit smaller a little bit bigger right now would be the time to do it since most likely in your first initial setup maybe you made a mistake just following the video so we're gonna go ahead and press undone and right down here we should see a second option if you don't remember we do have this arrow click on that arrow and we should see this now if you're having problems again just click on your first your second option i mean and just format this part of it and not the first part because um for some reason sometimes it creates errors once you try to format this part anyways what we're gonna do is go on the top right hand side we're going to see partitions click on partitions and then from here we can just repartition anything you would like so if you made a mistake in your initial setup this is how to do it so first of all always have journal selected first once we do that we're going to see this plus sign down here we're gonna add a partition now let's say i already showed you in another video how to do two partitions and so on so we're gonna add a few more so we're gonna click on plus and we can move this around so once you move this around you're gonna make one partition bigger than the other so we have three right now and i would never suggest actually touching the size so right here telling you how many gigs this partition is at do not touch this so don't type something into there that can actually create errors because everybody's math is not the best what i suggest doing is just moving this around in order to choose how big you was like your partition so maybe i want this one to be about that size i want this one to be a little bit bigger and this one obviously it's going to be the biggest one but it's almost the same thing as this one here so what i could do for this partition is name this one mac because this one will be journaled just for max now let's say i want this other partition just to be for pc and mac so transfer stuff between my pc and the other mac so if i have windows machine this will work so i'm going to choose exfat for that and then this one down here i'm going to choose as time machine so you know a lot of people like that having your time machine just in one pc and mac and then just mac files in the other one so we're just gonna go ahead and apply we're gonna just partition this and that's it that's all we have to do right now it's gonna bring it up to three partitions so we can do this all the time but remember anytime that you're formatting or re-partitioning your external hard drive for external ssd you are erasing everything from within it so don't have any files or important files in there if um again this is a new external hard drive new ssd there might be some files there from the factory which there's a bunch of programs in there or just one or two programs in there that don't even work for mac don't worry about those those are not good we're trying to avoid those so you don't have any future problems on your macs that's usually when i hear problems with anybody's external hard drive or ssd it's due to the fact that they installed this third-party software on their mac it's not working properly or they don't know how to get their files back or they just bought a new mac and it doesn't work anymore because it's not even compatible so to avoid all that just format it using the stuff that you guys have in your mac already and use time machine in order to make a good backup of your entire map but right now it is partitioning everything it might take longer than others depending how many partitions you're doing and how much you're doing but other than that it should be running pretty fast like so click on done once you're done and right now i don't have my three partitions here on the side let me just show you so i do have my pc and mac mac and time machine obviously i can access any of them by just clicking on them click on this one and just drag and drop any files into there such as this folder i can drop it there or i can just copy that one over and paste it on this one here and that's how easy it is to copy and paste anything onto your external hard drive anyways as for this video we are all done hopefully in all made sense just think about your external hard drive or external ssd like a big usb stick that you can drag and drop your files into there if you just want to back them up that way or use time machine or to back up your entire system which is really really great anyways that's it for this video if you guys have any comments questions you guys can write down here in the comments area don't forget subscribe and rate thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Tech & Design

Views: 12,360

Keywords: Insignia, movies, pc, storage device, Erase, Delete, External hd, macOS, MacBook Pro, Thecus, HDD, Mac, PNY, Seagate, videos, Manual, portable usb, files, Lenovo, Mac mini, hdd, Mac Pro, LaCie, G-Drive, seagte, Toshiba, USB, windows, External Hard Drive, Apple, time machine, EMTEC, music, Samsung, WD, G-Technology, External SSD, External Solid State Drive, usb drive, portable storage, HyperX, audio, wd, iMac, Dynex, format, Western Digital, external hd, Buffalo, usb stick, MacBook Air, SanDisk, Transcend

Id: GjzUlj2Oe0k

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021