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how to format external hard drives
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hey everyone today I'm going to be
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showing you how you can easily format an
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external hard drive or flash drive or
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any type of Drive pretty much like that
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to get it into the correct format and
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there's two reasons you'll want to
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format it first of all if you want to
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use your external hard drive or flash
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drive which I don't know not really a
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flash drive but an external hard drive
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with time machine and you buy a regular
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external hard drive pretty good chance
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it's not going to be formatted for the
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mac and it's going to be need to be
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reformatted before you're going to be
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able to use it for time machine backups
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and secondly everything is just a little
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more smooth when it's formatted for the
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Mac so in HFS which is the format that
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Mac's use um Windows typically uses fat
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or NTFS and you don't really have to
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worry about those names but um
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everything just seems to work more
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simply when it's formatted correctly for
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Max so to format any type of drive
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external hard drive flash drive you're
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going to need to use dis utility which
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is built in it's right your utilities
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folder um every Mac but what you can do
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which is easier is just search for it in
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Spotlight so I'll go up to my Spotlight
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menu
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here and I'm going to type in dis
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utility and I'll open up dis utility now
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my dis utility icon a little bit
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different I I have a custom icon for dis
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utility but yours will not look like
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that icon but the same application trust
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me so dis utility is open it's going to
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gather your disk information and on the
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left hand side you're going to see a
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panel with all the different discs that
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are connected to your
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computer you can see here I have my
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internal hard drive my time machine
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backup hard drive and that's split into
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two and
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then a USB here a USB flash drive
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plugged in so what you do is you just
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click on the name of any drive now what
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you're going to want to do is click on
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the name of the drive not the partition
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what I mean by that is you can see here
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this says 2.03 gbyte Kingston data
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traveler you click on that not the
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partition which is indented and that
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says USB because that is just the
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partition of it and that and not the
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actual device itself now if you know
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what partitions and you have separate
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partitions you can click on just a
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certain partition and it'll just erase
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that partition but in this case we're
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going to just erase the entire drive now
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this works both ways with external hard
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drives and flash drives and I'm just
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going to show you on the flash drive
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because I don't really want to erase my
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time machine backups so you're going to
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see all these tabs right here I'm just
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going to click on the erase Tab and now
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you're going to see the format now MS
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DOS which is f format is what Windows
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uses um for you know flash drives and
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things like that
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and that is probably most likely what
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the flash drive or external hard driv is
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going to come shipped with and of course
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you could spend the extra money and buy
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the Mac version of these external hard
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drives but it's much easier just to buy
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the plain old version and just format it
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afterwards it'll save you some money cuz
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I know manufactures like to mark up
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stuff like that so within format here
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you're going to choose Mac OS extended
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Journal now not the other ones now those
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are used for other things but if you
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want to use it with time machine and you
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just want the allaround best format for
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everyday file usage you're going to want
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to use Mac OS extended journal and then
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of course you can name it here I'm just
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going to name it flash
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drive now I can click on Security
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Options if I wanted to and this will
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give me some different options depending
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on how securely securely I want to erase
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this so don't erase security that's the
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quickest option or that don't erase data
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I should say and it doesn't actually
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erase the files so if you have a dis
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recovery application you can recover
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data off of it that's the least secure
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you can go all the way up to 35 pass
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arrays which basically writes over
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everything on the disk 35 times not
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necessary either zero art zero out data
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or the default Donas data are going to
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be fine um but thr erase data will still
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leave access to your files even when
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they're erased you won't be able to see
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them but they will still be
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there so I'm going to click okay and I'm
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just going to click erase now it's going
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to warn you it Del deletes all data on
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the partitions and it has one partition
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which is USB so I just click it erase
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and you can see it unmounts the
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dis it's going to partition it
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and it's just going to finish up it'll
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take longer depending on which security
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option you take and how big the disc is
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and you can see it's finished now and
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it's called flash drive and it's empty
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now you'll be able to see if I go into
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finder here and click on a drive there's
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nothing in it 1.88 gigabytes available
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now just a word of warning if you have
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this drive and you formatted it for Mac
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OS extended journal and you plan to use
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it on a Windows computer now you plug it
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in it's not going to be able to work
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it's going to tell you to format it on
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Windows because the formats are
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incompatible and windows will not be
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able to read Mac formatted drives so
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just a word of warning if you tend to
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transfer data back and forth between
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Windows machines and Macs you're going
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to want to leave it in the fat format so
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that's really all there is to it and
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this can save you some money in sense
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that you won't have to buy the Mac
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version of the external hard drive if
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that's what you're planning on buying
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which they sometimes do mark up and now
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you also know what to do when you want a
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drive prepared for time machine so
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that's relable at all that's as simple
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as it is and I hope you found this video
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useful thank you for watching
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