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. It is also widely supported by memory storage technology companies and third-party operating systems like OS X and Linux.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. Microsoft introduced exFAT in 2006 it’s an optimized version of FAT, providing better performance advantages over FAT32.
Now you’ll be able to save and copy files to your thumb drive on both Windows and OS X. In the Format list box, select ExFAT, enter a Volume Label if you want, then click Erase. Select your thumb drive in the Disk Utility window, then click the Erase tab. Launch Disk Utility press Command+Space then type: disk utility. If you only use a Mac computer, you can format your thumb drive to work on Windows systems.Ĭonnect the thumb drive to your Mac. In the File System list box, choose exFAT, type in a Volume Label if you want, and then click Start.Ĭlick OK to the format warning and wait until the process is complete. Right-click your flash drive and then select Format. Prepare a Thumb Drive for Both Windows and OS X or macOS Before you start, though, make sure your thumb drive is formatted so it can work on both Windows and macOS. If you’re working in a mixed environment, where you might need to work on files between both systems, a handy solution is to use a thumb drive. This makes it difficult to move data between the two unless you have them networked together. MacOS uses the HFS+ file system, while Windows uses the NTFS file system that shares little in common.
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