Apple doesn’t make it easy to manage external disks and drives on your Mac, and whether you want to connect an external hard drive or format it to erase all data, your Mac has specific requirements. Apple only recognizes drives formatted in a macOS-compatible format.
Similarly, formatting an external hard drive is also a tedious process, and if you are also facing a problem on how to format an external hard drive on Mac, then follow this step-by-step guide:
Before you start formatting an external drive on your Mac, you need to make sure you have the following:
A Mac computer with a USB port
An external drive or flash drive that you want to format. This can be an external hard drive, SSD, flash drive or USB.
Steps to follow:
1. Connect your external drive to your Mac using a USB cable.
2. Open Spotlight search by pressing Cmd + Spacebar.
3. In the Spotlight search, type Disk Utility
4. Open Disk Utility and locate your external drive
5. Click on it and hit the “Scan” button at the top of the screen
6. Select Format Drive and enter a name for the drive.
7. Click the Erase button to start formatting the drive.
Wait for the process to complete, it may take a few minutes depending on the size of the drive and the amount of data on it.