Dec 29, 2015 USB Flash Drives; External Hard Drives. You can format the drive from either the Mac or the Windows machine. However, if you want to use part. To format a hard drive for compatibility of both Mac and windows you can use FAT32 format which has both read/write capability on win/Mac respectively. Although we know its limitation of 4gb file size only. Means if one want to transfer movie or any stuff greater than 4gb it can’t be done in this format. To format the USB drive to FAT32, follow the next steps: Step 1. Connect the USB flash drive to your Mac computer. Step 2.Go to Applications Utilities Double click and open Disk Utility. Select your USB flash drive on the sidebar, choose Erase. How to Format USB Drive for Mac & PC. To share a USB drive between a Mac and a Windows PC, there are two disk formats to choose from: exFAT and FAT32. The other formats - Microsoft's NTFS and Apple's Mac OS Extended - don't work well on the other operating system. There are a few subtle differences between exFAT and FAT32, but most of.
Compatibility is a major concern when people have to shift to macOS. If you think finding the right software is a problem you’re wrong. Cygwin for mac. In a few days or weeks, you can get all the macOS alternative apps you need. The real problem comes when you need to deal with accessories. Let’s not talk about the advanced ones like the printers or scanners, but come to something basic – USB Drives. As you know, USB Drives are quite suitable when you need quick data transfer. Getting the best performance, though, requires you to erase and format a USB Drive on your Mac itself.
Let’s put everything in a practical sense now. You have recently purchased a computer that runs on macOS and you also got a USB Drive. Depending on the purpose of the pen drive, you need to make certain decisions during the formatting process. In this article, we have a quite-detailed guide on how to erase and format a USB Drive and keep it accessible on the devices you like. This guide will be suitable for both beginners as well as those who want to try some experiments with File System techniques on your Mac. Essentially speaking, we’ll help you format a USB drive in the right manner.
Before we start the tutorial, there are a few things to know!
Possible Reasons for Formatting USB Drive using Mac
Some of the common reasons why you may need to format a new/old USB Drive via macOS are as follows. Try to confirm the reason before we move ahead, because there may be some minute differences in the whole process.
If you can relate to the above-mentioned reasons, you can go ahead and format the USB Drive. For the first and third scenarios, you can simply go with traditional USB Formatting. https://miamiever244.weebly.com/mozilla-for-mac.html. You will need more insight if you’re formatting the drive for the sake of advanced compatibility.
How to Format USB in Mac – Let’s Go Step by Step
Note: For this article, we’re using a recently-bought SanDisk USB Drive of 16GB Capacity. It hasn’t been used before and I’d like to create a Mac-friendly USB Drive. So, the tutorial will be from that perspective. Shall we start?
Step #1
Connect the USB Drive to your Mac device, using the fastest port possible. Wait for a few seconds while your drive will be detected by the computer.
Step #2
We’re using an inbuilt Mac tool named Disk Utility to format USB Drives. In case if you don’t know, it’s quite a powerful tool for managing your disks, partitions and more. It’s one thing I liked about Mac when I shifted into Mac.
To open Disk Utility, you can simply search for it via Spotlight Search [ Press Cmd+Space and enter the query Disk Utility.] Alternatively, you can find it via Finder Menu à Go à Utilities and open Disk Utility from that list.
Step #3
Now, you’ll be able to see the Disk Utility interface of macOS.
On the sidebar of the interface, you can see two submenus – Internal and External. In my case, there is only one internal partition and you can see the USB Drive we’d connected earlier.
Step #4
To proceed further, you can select the USB Drive from External sub-menu.
In the upcoming page, there will be a toolbar on top position.
From the menu, choose the button named Erase.
Step #5
In a second, you can see a prompt window, asking for some details.
Step 5.1
Format Usb Drive For Mac And Windows 10
First of all, you can rename the USB Drive if you want. Otherwise, the previous name would be retained. It’s completely one’s choice and doesn’t have much to do with the functioning of the drive.
Step 5.2
Format Usb Drive For Both Mac And Windows
More importantly, you must select the appropriate Format of the drive. Here, you have four options, which offer different abilities. We’ll cover the technical aspects later, but a quick overview is necessary. The options you will find are:
Among these, we believe that ExFAT is the most appropriate File System for a USB drive. It offers complete support for Mac and other platforms. By the way, if you are planning to use the drive for backups — you will be having a big-enough USB Drive, we suppose —, you can go for Mac OS X Extended.
Step 5.3
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Now, you need to select the partition scheme from the three available options — GUID Partition Map, MBR and APM. https://miamiever244.weebly.com/blog/other-browsers-for-mac.
You can choose either GUID Partition Map or MBR if you want Windows compatibility. APM is exclusive for Apple devices, and it can be a problem at times. So, make sure that you make the right choice.
There is also an option named Security Options. In that window, you can select the appropriate ratio of security and speed. It’s an optional feature. So, if you have provided the above-mentioned features, it’s the time to hit the Erase button.
Final Step
Yeah, that’s about it. Citrix workspace for mac. You have, in a matter of a few minutes, have erased and formatted a USB Drive on your Mac. We hope that was easier than expected.
![]() Wrapping Up – How to Format USB on MacFormat Usb Drive For Mac And Pc Scheme
We believe this is a comprehensive guide on how to erase and format USB drives on your Mac. We’ve tried to cover almost all the sections and to clear your possible doubts. The only decisions that you need to take are the File System and Partition Scheme. Except those two, everything goes like clockwork. Have any other doubts while formatting your USB drive? Do let us know through your comments.
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