On the left column make double sure that you have chosen the removable drive or disk that you want to reformat – you don’t want to erase your system drive by accident! – then click on “ Erase” along the top. It’s a 32GB, but there’s 1GB taken up by the file system itself, a pretty typical size. On the right you can see the overall usable space on the device as 30.98GB. Launch it with the drive you want to reformat as FAT plugged in, and you’ll see something like this:Īs you can see, I’ve already chosen the external USB flash drive “Kingston DataTraveler 3.0”.
FAT32 also supports a 4GB limit to the size of individual files, plenty of space for just about all video files too.Īnyway, the program you want to use on your Mac is called Disk Utility and it’s found in the “Utilities” folder within your Applications folder.
Why? Because by using 32 bit addressing, FAT32 can have partitions up to 2TB, significantly more than the 4GB limit of FAT16. FAT16 helped, but FAT32 is the only format in widespread use at this point. Back in the day, FAT was an 8-bit format and dramatically limited the maximum size of files. FAT, by the way, stands for “file allocation table”, it has nothing to do with weight or size! Fortunately, your Mac system is quite capable of formatting a disk drive or flash drive in FAT format as desired.Ī point of clarification before we go further, however: FAT and FAT32 are the same thing at this point in the evolution of hard disks and drive formats. APM is an older, Mac-only partition scheme.Mac systems have always been able to work just fine with the Windows-based FAT file system, but not vice-versa: Apple File Systems (AFS) is not Windows compatible. You’ll also be asked to choose between a partition scheme: GUID Partition Map, Master Boot Record, or Apple Partition Map. RELATED: What's the Difference Between GPT and MBR When Partitioning a Drive?
It’s not natively supported on many Linux distributions, but you can install exFAT support on Linux.įor external drives, it almost always makes sense to format in ExFAT, unless you’re using the drive for Time Machine. ExFAT is the ideal cross-platform file system. You should use this file system if you may share the drive with Windows PCs and other devices like the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles.
You’ll have to enter a password, and you’ll need to provide that password whenever you connect your drive to your Mac. OS X Extended (Journaled, Encrypted): This is the same as the standard OS X Extended file system, but with encryption.This option exists because it matches the traditional behavior of UNIX and some people might need it–don’t select this unless you know you need it for some reason.
By default, Mac OS X doesn’t use a case-sensitive file system.
You’ll need to choose between several file systems: You’ll be asked to provide a name for the disk, which will appear and identify the disk when you connect it to a Mac, PC, or another device.
Select the drive by clicking its name.Ĭlick the “Erase” button after selecting the entire drive to erase the entire drive and create a single partition on it. Your connected drives will appear under “External” in the Disk Utility’s sidebar. You can also open a Finder window, select “Applications” in the sidebar, and head to Utilities > Disk Utility.