

When you format a hard drive, you may worry about two things: 1. Top 5 Disk Formatting Tool for Windows/Mac In this article, we will introduce 5 disk formatting tools for Windows and Mac to help you securely format hard drive/USB flash drive or memory card on a PC or a Mac. One interesting feature of OS X Extended is that it is case-sensitive, i.e if you specifically name a file “BeachShot1,” OS X will see that file as different from a similar file named “beachshot1.If you want to format a hard drive or USB flash drive on your computer, disk formatting tool is the best choice. It’s recommended to use this format whenever you need to use an external drive with OS X only. Your internal Macintosh drive is also formatted in this format.

OS X Extended is Mac’s native drive format. Note that ExFAT is only compatible with versions of Windows later than Vista. ExFAT is basically an extension of FAT that allows for larger file sizes to be written and more. ExFATĮxFAT is for those of you who are finding it hard to use FAT with all the limits, especially the large file transfer issue.

Most drives are formatted in MS – DOS (FAT) out of the box.

But apart from that, this will be the format you’ll want to use if you want a drive with cross-compatibility for quick transfers, or temporary storage. One of the major limitations of this format is that it’s not able to write files larger than 4GB, which can be quite a setback. MS-DOS (FAT) is the most popular format amongst external hard disks, as it’s both readable and writable by nearly all operating systems, Windows and OS X included. With Disk Utility, you have 3 main formats that you can erase your disk to. Once done, press Enter, and your disk should be erased and formatted completely. For example, I’d use “disk2s2” if I wanted to erase Untitled only in the example below: Use eraseDisk to erase the entire external disk, or eraseVolume if you just want to erase a particular partition. If you want to reformat, replace eraseDisk with reformat and delete the “JHFS+” and “diskname” parts of the command. Change “diskname” to the new name you want for the disk, and replace “diskidentifier” to the Disk Identifier obtained from Disk Utility. In the command above, change “JHFS+” to “ HFS+” if you want a volume that is not journalled. Diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ diskname diskidentifier
