Jul 13,2020 • Filed to: Hard Drive Recovery • Proven solutions
Choosing an External Drive: Solid-State Drive (SSD) or Hard Disk Drive (HDD) The first step in creating a backup for your Mac is choosing an external drive that enables the best data recovery option. Choosing between an SSD or HDD means taking a look at the pros and cons of each. Hard Disk Drives. Pros: Storage capacity, price point. Installing the Mac operating system on an external drive is the safest way to get a good look at a new OS without changing anything on your Mac. It'll leave your current configuration intact.
“How to format an external hard drive Mac? What format system to use when reformatting my storage drive for a Mac?”
This is a frequent question asked by first-time, as well as the not-so-tech-savvy, macOS users. Learning how to format an external hard drive Mac is essential. Because saving all your data on the Cloud is nice and all, but physical storage is still popular. Especially if you don’t have a stable internet connection or if most of your files are large.
Luckily, you don’t have to learn rocket science to be able to format an external hard drive for Mac or PC. The operation is pretty straightforward.
When it comes to your Apple device, there are two methods to use. Read on to find out all you need to know about them.
Part 1: What Is the Best Format for External Hard Drive Mac?
The first step to formatting your external drive for a Mac computer is choosing the right format. There are four possible choices:
To understand which is the best for you, let’s have a comprehensive overview of each of them.
Apple File System
Netgear wn111v2 mac os driver. The APFS was first introduced in 2017 as a replacement for the HFS+. Nowadays, all new Macs come with the operating system preinstalled on APFS, as this system is optimized for use with SSD and flash storage drives. However, it still works with traditional HDD drives too.
This is the best format to pick if you have an external SSD or USB flash drive that you don’t intend to use with a Windows device.
The biggest strength of this system is the speed, as well as the encryption and metadata handling. However, you won’t be able to use this system with Time Machine.
Mac OS Extended
The HFS+, or Hierarchical File System plus on its real name, was the main file system used for Mac until 2017.
This type of file system is suitable to use with both HDD and SDD drives, but the latter will perform slightly better with the APFS mentioned above. If you have an older Mac, though, choosing the HFS+ is your best bet.
In general, all external drives formatted to HFS+ work nicely with older Mac versions but are incompatible with Windows.
Extended File Allocation Table
Designed by Microsoft, the exFAT is a good choice if you plan to use the external hard drive with both macOS and Windows systems. Yet, you won’t get top performance on either. This choice is more appropriate for USB flash drives, although you can still use it for SDD and HDD units too.
The main issue with exFAT is that your drive will be more prone to fragmentation when used with Apple devices and is less stable than NTFS on Windows. If you really have to share the drive between Mac and Windows machines, that’s your best option though.
MS-DOS
Macs also support FAT32 drives, marked as FAT in Disk Utility. This format should be avoided at all costs unless you’re dealing with a really old Windows computer, which you really have to use in parallel with your Mac system.
Typically, there is no reason to choose this option unless you’re planning to use the external hard drive on a Windows XP or earlier machine.
Part 2: How to Format an External Hard Drive Mac?
Now that you know which format to choose, it’s time to learn how to format an external hard drive for Mac. There are essentially two methods, with Disk Utility or Time Machine function.
Virtual floppy drive mac os catalina. Note: If you plan to format an older external drive, perhaps one you used with another device, make sure to backup all data before proceeding. Formatting is a permanent procedure that can’t be reversed. While there are data recovery software you can use if you lost data, it is always better to prevent.
That said, here’s how to format an external hard drive Mac:
Method 1: Format Mac Hard Drive with Disk Utility
Disk Utility is a utility application proprietary to macOS that is used to both format and manage internal and external disks. Here’s how to use it:
Step 1 Connect the external hard drive you want to format to your Mac, then start the Disk Utility app that you can find under Applications -> Utilities.
Step 2 On the left side of the Utilities screen, find the name of the external hard drive you want to format and select it. Then, on the top side under the Disk Utility, click on the Erase button.
Step 3 Follow the on-screen prompts to select the desired file system and allow the drive to format. That’s it! After the process is complete, you can either start using the drive or choose to create partitions on it.
Method 2: Format Mac Hard Drive with Time Machine
Formatting an external hard drive with Time Machine is as easy as formatting it with Disk Utility. Time Machine, however, gives you the possibility to create an automatic backup of the data on your hard drive before formatting it.
Before you proceed, therefore, you should first set up the external drive to use with Time Machine.
To do this, open System Preferences and select Time Machine after you’ve connected the external drive to your Mac.
Now, click on Select Disk and select the desired drive from the list. Click on the Use Disk button. At this point, the system will run an automatic backup two minutes after you’ve clicked on the Use Disk button, or you can proceed with the formatting if the hard disk is empty.
To format an external hard drive for Mac with Time Machine, you must follow the steps below.
Step 1 Open Finder, Applications, then go to Utilities and Disk Utility.
Step 2 Follow the steps above to format the drive, and then you can use it with Time Machine on your Mac system.
Part 3: Bonus Tip – Data Recovery from Formatted Hard Drive on Mac
Sometimes, it may happen that you accidentally formatted an external hard drive containing important data. Whether it’s your wedding pictures or your bachelor’s degree thesis, chances are you want to get that data back as quickly as possible.
If you have a newer version of Mac, you can use the Apple Time Machine to recover your canceled files, or you could choose to use external software, such as Recoverit Data Recovery.
1. Recover Data with Apple Time Machine
In the former hypothesis, you can try to recover your data with the Time Machine. This app is Apple’s backup feature present on the newer systems. If you followed the steps above before formatting the hard drive with Time Machine and allowed the app to execute the backup, then there are high chances that you can recover any lost data without too much hassle.
To do so, just launch the Time Machine and browse through the folders to see if it has saved the files you require.
For easier browsing, you can use the time stamp feature on the right side of the screen and select the date or time when you executed the backup.
Once you found the files, simply click on Restore to get them back.
2. Recover Data with Recoverit Data Recovery
If you didn’t use the Time Machine function or couldn’t find the files you need, you can try to recover any lost files with trusted third-party software, such as Recoverit Data Recovery.
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This system is also very easy to use, in just three easy steps:
Step 1 Install the application and choose the desired location
Download and install the software on your Mac computer, then open it and select the external hard drive, partition, or location where you want to retrieve data.
Step 2 Start the scan to retrieve your lost data
Click the Start button. The software will now scan the selected drive and display all retrieved data in an easy-to-scour list.
Step 3 Preview the recovered files and save them in your chosen location
Review and select the target files, then launch the recovery process. That’s it. The software will restore your lost data.
Conclusion
As you can see, how to format an external hard drive Mac is not particularly complicated. The Disk Utility allows you to format the desired drive to the desired system in a blink of an eye. Backing up the data on your drive with Time Machine also allows you to avoid the recovery hassle.
If you still lost some data, you even know which software to use to recover all lost files.
Now it’s your turn. Use this guide to format your external drive, download, and use the data recovery software if needed, and don’t forget to share this article with your Mac-addicted friends. They might make good use of it too.
Partitioning your hard drive can be a frustrating and daunting task. However, once you understand how the process works, it’s a lot less scary. So why would you want to partition a drive?
Back when I was in college, like many other students, I had a MacBook Pro for ease of use and its minimalist aesthetic. I didn’t think about the fact that some applications that I needed for school were not compatible on Mac. That is when I thought about partitioning my drive so that I could run Windows on Mac.
In addition, I had an external hard drive that I also wanted to be able to use with both OS X and Windows. In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps for partitioning internal and external hard drives on a Mac.
Before you start, you should make sure to backup your entire Mac computer using Time Machine. Even if you don’t mess anything up, the chances are good that the OS will screw up and break your system.
Partition External Drive
If you have a large external hard drive, you can easily partition it so that the entire drive gets utilized. I was using a 1.5 TB external drive with my Mac, but never really used more than 1/4 of the space.
Instead, here’s how I ended up partitioning my drive, which ended up making it much more useful:
As you can see, each partition can have its own file format. If you have an even larger drive, you can create even more partitions for other operating systems like Linux, etc.
To partition the drive, go to Spotlight at the top of your MacBook Screen (Notification Bar) and type in Disk Utility.
Mac Os X Backup External Drive
On the left hand side, navigate to the tab that says EXTERNAL.
Yours will look a little bit different than mine. Under the External heading on the left hand side, you should have one hard drive instead of 3 (I have already partitioned mine). Navigate to that external hard drive and partition it according to your needs.
NOTE: If your external hard drive is not formatted for the Mac operating system, you may first need to Initialize it and then Erase it. It’s very easy:
Note that you can also click on Security Options and choose from different levels of security. By default, OS X will use the fastest method, which not does securely erase the drive. If you move the slider to Most Secure, it will meet the DOD standard for erasing data by overwriting the data 7 times. This will prevent anyone or any software from recovering any previously written data from the drive.
OS X may ask you if you want to use the drive for Time Machine backups, but you should choose Decide Later unless you want to use the entire drive for the backups. Now you’re ready to partition the external drive!
Go to the top where it has the options: First Aid, Partition, Erase, Restore, Mount, etc. Select Partition and create the partitions based on your specific needs. In my case, I chose a size of 500 GB, which is one-third of the drive.
Select how you would like to partition the drive (refer back to my percentages, as that’s what I have used in the screenshots here), select Apply and then click Partition. After this, it will take a few minutes to partition, so be patient!
When completed should see the green check mark next to your drive and it should say Operation Successful. Now select Done and you’re done with the first partition.
Now to partition the rest of the space, you will click on Untitled under External and then click on Partition again.
Give the partition a name, pick a size and choose the format. Since this is going to be for Windows storage, I chose MS-DOS (FAT). You can also choose exFAT if you like as that is compatible with both Windows and Mac.
Partition Internal Drive
Partitioning an internal hard drive is pretty much the same in terms of the procedure you have to follow, but it’s a little bit different in how it gets implemented.
Since you already have OS X installed on your internal drive, when you click Partition and choose a size, you’ll notice that you can’t create a partition that is smaller than the amount of space already used on the drive.
My internal drive was already using 359GB of space, so when I typed in 200GB, it automatically changed it to 359GB and put up a message stating that the first volume cannot be removed and the volume could not be split because the resulting volumes would be too small.
So if you want to create an additional partition, the first thing is to create a partition that will include OS X and give you some additional space for installing programs, etc. Below, I left the name as Macintosh HD and made the partition 500GB. That means the partition where OS X is installed with have about 140GB of breathing room for extra data.
Basically, we are just shrinking the original partition, which took up the entire disk to something smaller. Then we will partition the free space as we like.
As you can see, I have made the original partition 500GB instead of 1TB, which frees up 500GB on the disk for creating other partitions. As with the external hard drive, once the partition has been created, click on Untitled, but this time under the Internal heading and click on Partition.
Apple Mac Backup External Drive
That’s basically all there is to partitioning drives in OS X. Hopefully, it worked for you. Enjoy!
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