Yeah, of course you can borrow my SSD.
No problem!
Yeah, not at all, talk soon, bye.
Oh crap!
I forgot! That hard drive has on it my plans to take over the world!
Hello!!
And welcome to DIY in 5, the show where we break down tech into easily digestible tidbits
for the everyday user.
My name is Trisha Hershberger and today we’re going to go over everything you wanted to know
about formatting a hard drive.
What is it?
When should you do it?
When should you not do it?
How does one go about doing it?
Never fear, I got you.
So just what is disk formatting?
Disk formatting is the process of prepping a storage device - like a hard drive, SSD,
thumb drive, etc - to store information.
There are three main parts of this process - low-level formatting - basic prep of the drive,
partitioning - making the data on the drive recognizable to the operating system,
and high-level formatting which usually refers to the process of creating a new file system.
For simplicity, most people use the term ‘format’ to refer to all 3 parts of this process and luckily,
there are modern operating systems that make this process much less complicated than it sounds.
Most drives come preformatted out of the box, so the initial formatting is done for you.
However, you might consider reformatting the drive if you want to completely erase the
data on a drive - yes, formatting wipes it all clean (for the most part)
- or if you need to make the drive compatible with a different computer that necessitates a different format.
If you’ve ever heard about a thumb drive working on a pc but not on a mac or vise versa,
it’s the formatting option that’s usually the culprit
There are a few different drive formats to choose from.
FAT stands for File Access Table and it is the OG disk format.
exFAT & FAT64 are format types designed for use with cards and flash drives.
FAT32 is a common option you’ll hear mentioned because it’s recognized
by both Mac and Windows operating systems, but offers no security and caps files at 4GB in size.
NTFS format has a much larger max file size, but is read-only on Mac OS X.
HFS or Mac OS Extended is the native solution for Mac users and has the max file size of any of them,
but is a no go for PC users.
That being said, there are workarounds to use NTFS on a Mac or HFS on PC
but we aren’t going to get into all that for the purposes of this video.
Another option, for those who freely float between Windows and MacOS is to partition your hard drive
and have a portion of it formatted for each OS.
Again, not covered in this video, but if that’s something your interested in
please let us know in the comments and the magical Kingston gremlins will make it so.
So how do you format a hard drive?
Remember when I said modern operating systems make this process less complicated?
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
For my PC user friends out there, the quickest solution is to open up File Explorer, find
the drive you want to format on the lefthand side, right click and choose format.
You are then presented with a simple set of options to do the thing.
And if you want to go a little deeper than what that menu allows, you can also open Disk Management
and format the drive here, again right clicking on the drive you want to format and making
your selection for file system, capacity, unit size and your drive name.
If you choose Quick format, this is obviously a faster option,
but it will not scan the disk for bad sectors.
A full format will take care of that for you.
Ok, Mac folks!
Your turn!
Launch Disk Utility, which is built right in to Mac OS.
Choose the drive you’d like to format on the left then choose Erase.
Disk Utility will automatically choose a format for you, including the option of APFS
if you are running High Sierra or newer, or you can use the formatting options drop-down
to choose a different format.
After that, you’ll name your drive and head on over to the next step - Security Options.
Here you’ll choose where you lie on a slider between Fastest and Most Secure.
Fastest will leave some of the underlying files there, even though they’ll be hidden
whereas Most Secure erases everything seven times over.
No looking back!
Click on Erase and that’s that!
Now that your top secret plans for world domination (cough!)
I mean, old family photos, are off of the drive, it’s ready to use on a brand new PC
...with no lingering evidence.
So what’s your go-to format for storage?
Let us know in the comments.
Also, while you’re here, check out these other great tip-filled videos.
And if these tips helped you at all,
please go ahead and subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes.
Thanks so much for watching and we’ll see ya next time with more DIY in 5!