How To Format An External Hard Drive On Your Mac
27WB Black SN850X 4TB https://geni.us/v0dr
Acasis USB4.0 Thunderbolt 40Gb/s enclosure https://geni.us/u9A5heL
MacBook Pro M1 Max https://geni.us/2F4Vr
WD Elements 18TB https://geni.us/7ODBk
Sandisk ULTRA 3D SSD https://geni.us/fEOiA
Laptop stand used with the MacBook https://geni.us/4JJd7
Other off the shelf drives and components to consider:
Thunderbolt SSD https://geni.us/EG3Av6
USB C Flash drive https://geni.us/dmFeYYw
USB4.0 SSD https://geni.us/6uZLzmj
Thunderbolt enclosure https://geni.us/a7Rr
1TB NVME SSDs https://geni.us/Q1WpxHx
2TB NVME SSD https://geni.us/UnMGNB
4TB NVME SSD https://geni.us/TxvEpAk
8TB NVME SSD https://geni.us/B0F2X8
Here's a video showing how to build the drive used in this video: https://youtu.be/sV9EDKc5zpk
How To Format An External Hard Drive On Your Mac
In this video I'm showing how to format an external hard drive on your Apple Mac computer. I'm using a MacBook Pro M1 Max in this example, although, you can do the same with any Apple MacBook laptop and any Apple desktop computer such as a Mac Mini, Mac Studio, iMac or Mac Pro.
In the video I mention two formats, APFS and ExFAT. APFS was introduced to Mac computers in 2017 with the release of MacOS 10.13. While there are other disk format and file format options for use on Mac computers. Moving forward, since the introduction of Apple Silicon ARM with M1 and now with M2 and M3 likely to appear toward the end of 2023. APFS is now the de facto file format for all Macs and it's what's used for the Mac system drive.
As mentioned in the video, ExFAT is a good format option for your external drives if you plan on using them with other operating system such as Windows, Linux, Android, Chrome etc. However, if you only intend on using your external drives with Mac computers with MacOS 10.13 to later. Then APFS is a great for choice for formatting your external hard drives.
Also as mentioned in the video. This formatting guide is also good for other media types such as SD card, USB flash drives or USB thumb drives, traditional mechanical hard drives, SATA SSD drives, NVME & SATA M.2 drives and other lesser used drives.
So as well as showing you how to format the external USB4.0 Thunderbolt NVME SSD that I used for this example. This guide on formatting on the Mac should also be good for answering the following questions.
How to format an SD card on your Mac?
How to format a USB flash drive on your Mac?
How to format a USB thumb drive on your Mac?
How to format an external USB4.0 hard drive on your Mac?
How to format an external Thunderbolt hard drive on your Mac?
How to format an external USB4.0 SSD on your Mac?
How to format an external Thunderbolt SSD on your Mac?
How to format an external SSD on your Mac?
Also. Since the release of Apple Silicon ARM M1. Any Apple computer, laptop, desktop or otherwise, will be compatible with USB4.0, Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4. So what this basically means is that all these Macs will be compatible with all USB standards from USB2 up to and including USB4.0 and also the two Thunderbolt standards of 3 and 4. Which means that external storage drives and external hard drives using enclosures that have those interfaces, will be compatible with your Mac.
This same process will also apply for any current Mac that has expandable storage for adding extra internal drives and if and when Apple decide to release any new Mac computers that allow for extra internal drives, likely to be internal M.2 NVME Gen4 and the future Gen5 NVME SSDs with the yet to be released Mac Pro. Or maybe not?
Video chapters:
00:00 Intro and explanation
00:38 How to format
05:38 End summary
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