How to Format an Exernal Hard Drive for Mac.
Most external hard drives are in NTFS format, which means they work fine in Windows, but on a MAC, the drive will become read-only. Or, let’s say you brought in an unformatted hard drive. In any case, if you are going to use your hard drive on MAC only , you will have to format it to a MAC-HFS-enabled file system.
However, if you want to use this hard drive on both Mac and Windows or any other operating system, there are other workarounds. As when using FAT32 or software such as NTFS-3G. This video explains in detail.
So let’s see how to format NTFS hard drive to HFS + using MAC.
1. Connect an external hard drive to your MAC. Make sure it is installed correctly and you can access its contents. If there is any data in it, please make a backup. Because formatting the disc will also erase the data.
2. Now press cmd + space bar to start the spotlight, type disk utility and press Enter. You can also go to Go Utilities. In the / Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility folder.
3. In the Disk Utility window, click the external hard drive icon and then select the Erase option at the top of the window.
4. From the drop-down menu “Volumeâ€, “Format†select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)â€, also specify a name (for example, 2TBHFS) or any other name.
5. Then click “Erase” and that’s it. In a few seconds, your drive will be formatted to HFS +. To confirm, unplug the drive and plug it back in, open Finder click the hard drive name and press CMD + I. Under drive format , you should see HFS +.
Now you can use this drive to read and write data on your MAC. Also see:
How to use HFS hard drive in Windows with HFS Explorer
How to Use HFS / NTFS Hard Drive on Android (Both ROOT and Non-ROOT) How to Use NTFS Drive on MAC – 3 Ways to Format Hard Drives on Windows, MAC, Linux and Android