So – you’re using a Mac, and you need to erase a hard drive or a memory stick. You’ve
opened Disk Utility, and you’re offered a list of confusing formats. Which one do
you choose? In this video, I’ll help you decide which
format is best for you. When you need to erase a hard drive or a memory
stick, your Mac has a really useful tool called the Disk Utility. You can find it by going
into your Finder, opening Applications, then opening the Utilities folder, and double-clicking
on Disk Utility. I’m going to plug in a memory stick that
needs to be erased. The memory stick appears on the left-hand side of Disk Utility, and
if I click on it I can see that its capacity is about 34 GB, and its format is something
called NTFS. To erase the memory stick, I just need to
click on the Erase button up at the top. Here we can give the drive a new name if we
like, and then we have to choose a format. And there’s our problem. There’s more
than one way to erase a disk. Your storage can be formatted in different ways, depending
on what you plan to use it for. That’s because, over the years, computers
have been designed by several competing companies, and these companies have never agreed on a
single standard way of storing data on drives. So let’s look at the options, and don’t
worry if your Mac has more options than you see here, because I will be covering them
all. First, we have two options that both start
with Mac OS Extended. As you might have guessed, Mac OS Extended has for a long time been the
standard file system for Macs. If you’re formatting the main hard drive
on your Mac, you normally want to use Mac OS Extended. This format won’t work on Windows
computers though. If you’re setting up an external hard drive or a memory stick, and
you’re certain it’s only ever going to be used on a Mac, then you’re best formatting
it with Mac OS Extended. One scenario where it’s essential to use
Mac OS Extended is if you’re setting up a Time Machine backup drive, because Time
Machine won’t work with any other format. So If you’ve decided to use Mac OS Extended,
you just need to know the difference between journaled and case-sensitive, journaled. Well,
the case-sensitive version means if you store a file with a name that has just lower-case
letters, it’s different to a file with the same name that has upper-case and lower-case
letters in the name. If you think you’ll ever need to store two files like this in
the same place on your drive, then you should choose case-sensitive. This would be an unusual
thing to do though, and I recommend you just go for the first option, Mac OS Extended Journaled.
And this is also the version that Apple recommend. Next, let’s look at an option that isn’t
on my list but might be on yours – APFS. In fact, if I cancel this screen and go over
to my main drive, you can see it’s formatted with APFS. APFS is a new file system introduced
by Apple in 2017. You’ll find it on some Macs with High Sierra installed. You can’t
use APFS to format hard drives – it only works with SSDs. It’s more reliable and
more efficient than Mac OS Extended, so if you’re given the option of APFS you should
probably use it. Just bear in mind that you won’t be able to use a drive formatted in
APFS on any Mac older than High Sierra, or on any Windows computer.
And just like when we looked at Mac OS Extended, APFS gives you the choice of having Case-sensitive.
And you probably want to choose the version that’s not Case-sensitive.
Now if we go back to my memory stick, let’s have a look at these remaining formats in
a slightly different order. At the bottom of the list, we can see the
Windows NT File System, or NTFS. It’s greyed out, meaning we can’t use it to format our
drive, but it’s also ticked, which means it happens to be the format that’s currently
on my memory stick. As you might have guessed, NTFS is a standard
file format on Windows, so I guess I must have formatted this drive using my Windows
computer. You can use your Mac to read and open files
saved on your memory stick with the NTFS format, but your Mac won’t let you save your changes
to the drive and it won’t let you store new files there. NTFS is considered a read-only
format on the Mac, and we can’t use the Disk Utility to format a drive in this way.
So, if we want to be able to use our drive on both Windows and Mac, we need a format
that works on both. And that’s where the final two formats come in.
FAT and ExFAT MS-DOS (FAT) is an older standard that will
work on almost any computer or device. If you’re struggling to get an old drive working,
then FAT is your best chance to get it working on most computers. The downside to FAT is
it’s an older format now, and it can’t be used for storing anything larger than 4
gigabytes, which rules out it being used for movies or other large files. And with FAT
you can only make partition sizes of up to 2 terabytes, and there are drives out there
that store 4 terabytes or 8 terabytes now. ExFat is a newer format, and it’s an improvement
on FAT that removes the 4 gigabyte limitation. It works on Windows computers with Windows
Vista or newer, Macs with MacOS 10.6.5 or newer, and most modern versions of Linux.
So, unless you need to work with Windows XP or a very old Mac, ExFat is going to be the
best format to use on an external drive. Now if you want to change the format of a
drive that already contains all your files, you’re going to need to copy those files
over to another drive before you start, because formatting a drive erases everything on the
drive. Once you’ve erased the drive with the new format, you should be able to copy
all your files back onto it.
So just to summarize, if you’re going to formatting the main drive on your Mac, and
it’s an SSD, you should choose APFS. But if you’re formatting the hard drive on a
Mac then it’s Mac OS Extended (Journaled). And if you’re going to format an external
drive that’s going to be used exclusively with Macs, or as a Time Machine backup drive,
you should also use Mac OS Extended (Journaled). But if you’re erasing an external drive
that’s going to be used on Mac, Windows or any other modern device, then you should
use ExFAT. Let me in the comments below which format
you went for, and if this video helped you, please give it the thumbs up.
And if you’d like to see more tutorials like this from me in future, please hit the
red subscribe button. Thanks for watching.