Out of the box, USB flash drives may function unreliably or even fail to work on Macs at all. The reason? Mac and Windows each use different file systems.Īfter unboxing a new storage-based item, it’s a wise move to look into how to format a hard drive for Mac (or SD card, flash drive, etc.) to reduce the likelihood of unexpected corruption, data loss, or other performance issues.
Thanks to Disk Utility, the issue of how to format USB on Mac is fairly straightforward. Likewise, you can use this tool to format Micro SD cards, hard drives, and so on, getting your new device into the right condition. Go to Disk Management, by right clicking on the start menu button. Now the drive doesn't have partitions anymore, it's just an unallocated space. type select disk X where X is the number noted in step 3. type list disk and note the number of the APFS formatted disk.
Give the device a name and choose the desired format (more on that below)įirst of all, let’s cover the obvious point above: when you format USB drive on Mac, or any similar device for that matter, you need to erase everything that’s on it in order to do so.Select the relevant device or drive in the left sidebar and click Erase.Go to Applications > Utilities and open Disk Utility.Note that formatting a drive means completely erasing it, so make sure you read our recommendations on how to back up and recover files below. Launch a new Command Prompt (cmd) Type the command diskpart. That’s not a problem if the device is new, but means you’ll need to take some precautionary measures if it’s not. Second, the desired format will depend on the type of device you’re using.