How to format your USB drive on Mac

Let’s learn how to format USB drive on your Mac

Generally, Mac supports variety of external hard drives and USB drives. If are unable to format a USB drive that has a different format which is not recognized on your Mac, it may only happen when you are using USB format designed for Windows OS like FAT32 system. Otherwise, you may easily format a USB device using the Disk Utility application on your Mac. If you want to know the drive’s file system, just plug in your USB drive and open the Finder. You need to right-click or Control-click the drive’s icon in the Finder’s sidebar and select “Get Info.” If you want to use your USB drive with another file system, you may format it. Let’s learn how to format USB drive on your Mac.

You may easily format your USB drive using Disk Utility on your Mac, follow these steps:

Note: Formatting of USB drive will permanently erase the data, so make sure that you have a complete backup of your crucial data you have on your USB.

• First off, connect your USB drive to your Mac.
• Now, launch the “Applications” folder and then click on “Utilities.”
• Click the “Disk Utility” option, doing so will open the Disk Utility window on your Mac screen.

• Now, click on the name of your USB drive in the left side pane of the “Disk Utility” window.
• Now, select the “Erase” tab on the top of the Disk Utility window.
• Click on the dropdown menu next to the “Format” option and then select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled),” or your desired format type.
• The format option ensures that the USB drive is fully compatible with your Mac, since most USB drives are preformatted for Windows computers by default.
• Now, enter a name for the USB drive in the “Name” field and then click the “Erase” button located at the bottom right corner of Disk Utility window.
• Finally select “Erase” again in the confirmation dialog box appears, doing so will format your USB drive and make it ready to use on your Mac.

Now read: How to create an iPhone data back up on external drive

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