You can also pick FAT and exFAT formats, however, if you want the drive to be compatible with Windows as well as MacOS.įormatting any USB drive for the Mac is the same regardless of whether it’s a USB flash drive, USB external SSD drive, USB key, a traditional spinning USB HDD drive, or whatever other external drive or disk you have. * You may have noticed you can also choose other file system types when formatting a USB drive on the Mac, but for most Mac users they’ll want to stick with Mac OS Extended. Now you’re ready to use the formatted USB drive on your Mac for whatever purpose, whether that’s to use as a Time Machine backup drive, a destination for manual file backup, extra storage space, run an operating system directly from, or whatever else you’d like to do. When finished, click “Done” and put the drive to use as intended.Let Disk Utility erase the drive, depending on the type of disk this may either be very quick or take some time, but be patient until it finishes.Give the drive a name if you’d like to, like ‘backup’ or whatever, and if you want native Mac compatibility then choose “MacOS Extended (Journaled)” as the file system type, then click on “Erase” *.Click the “Erase” button in the toolbar.Select the USB drive you want to format from the left sidebar.Open Disk Utility on the Mac from /Applications/Utilities/ or with Spotlight.How to Format an External USB Drive on Macįormatting will erase everything on the drive to make it natively compatible with MacOS. It’s important to remember that formatting a drive will erase all data on the drive, so you will not want to do this if you have data on the drive that you wish to preserve.
The process to erase and format a a USB drive is the same regardless of whether the drive is a USB hard drive, USB flash drive, SSD, key, thumbdrive, or otherwise, and it’s also the same regardless of whether or not the drive is USB-C or USB-A.
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