Here's how to format a drive using a Mac - including how to format a drive for Windows and Mac so the contents can be read on both platforms, and what format to use for Time Machine. Formatting Flash Drive on Mac There are several applications available online for formatting USB drives such as 321Soft USB Flash Recovery for Mac, Data Recovery for Mac, and Disk Drill. These third party tools allow to format flash drive on your mac.

Mac OS Extended (Journaled) - This is the default file system format for Mac OS X drives. Advantages: Formatting your USB flash drive this way will give you full interoperability with Macs. AweCleaner for Mac is a disk cleaning software and management software for Mac. It offers formatting tool to help you format USB flash drive or external hard drive on Mac. The same as Disk Utility, it can't permanently erase the formatted data.

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Summary: This article tells how to format a USB flash drive on Windows 10/8/7 and Mac when you want to reformat a new or second-hand removable storage device to make sure it doesn’t contain any malicious files or fix the logical errors.

What is Formatting？

Formatting is the fastest way to prepare the USB flash drive for the initial use. It wipes all the data stored on your flash drive and allows full use of the storage capacity. Meanwhile, it also creates a filing system that can help organizes your data on Windows or Mac.

Which File System Should I Choose for a USB Flash Drive?

We can’t talk about formatting without talking about file system as it differs when we are using the different computers; the common file systems are FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS for Windows, APFS, HFS+, and exFAT for macOS, here we will only talk about the most common file systems when formatting a USB flash drive:

FAT32: It’s compatible with all major operating systems and uses less memory usage. But it cannot handle single files larger than 4GB and has a limited partition size (up to 32GB).
NTFS: It can create partitions larger than 32GB and read/write files larger than 4GB. Besides, it supports on-the-fly file encryption. The disadvantage is that the Mac computer can only read the data from the NTFS drive.
exFAT: It provides an unlimited file and partition size. It serves no matter the Windows or Mac users who want to work with files larger than 4GB.

Usb Flash Drive Format Utility

We strongly recommend that you use exFAT, which is considered the best choice for both Windows and Mac computers, whereas the exFAT file system works better than FAT32 and can handle the file size up to 16GB.

How to Format a USB Drive on Windows 7/8/10?

After deciding which file system you are going to apply, let’s explore the formatting methods. Generally, On Windows 10, 8, 7, there are some common ways you can format a USB flash drive.

Method 1: Format a USB Flash Drive Using File Explorer

This is the easiest way with which many users are familiar. Refer to the following steps to learn how.

Step 1: Connect your USB flash drive and open press Win key + E to open File Explorer.

Step 2: Right-click on the drive and choose the Format option.

Step 3: Expand the File system drop-down menu and select the exFAToption.

Format Flash Drive For Mac And Windows 10

Step 4: Click on the Start button.

Note: Uncheck the Quick Format means full format; it goes with a thorough scanning and wiping your data on the USB flash drive, you will have no chance to get back your data after using this option.

Method 2: Format a USB Flash Drive Using Diskpart

Using diskpart to format a USB flash drive is another useful method, and even it works for the computer user who has no exFAT options in File Explorer or Disk Management. However, the user should select the correct volume before carrying out a quick or full format on your USB flash drive:

Step 1: Enter Command Prompt in the search bar and then right-click it, choose Run as administrator.

Step 2: Enter below-written commands in the same order and same diskpart window:

diskpart
list volume
select volume NUMBER (Replace NUMBER to the exact number of your USB flash drive)
format fs=exFAT quick (Don’t enter quick if you want a full format)

Note: Replace exFAT if you choose another file system, for example, enter the command format fs=fat32 to format the USB flash drive into FAT32 format.

Formatting Flash Drive For Mac

Method 3: Format a USB Drive Using Disk Management

This is a method similar to the one performed by using File Explorer, and here are the steps you can follow:

Step 1: Press Win + Q, type in Disk Management and open it.

Step 2: Right-click on the desired USB flash drive and select Format.

Step 3: Select exFAT from the File System drop-down menu.

Step 4: Click on the OK button.

Method 4: Format a USB Flash Drive Using PowerShell (Windows 10 Only)

PowerShell is a task and configuration management platform which was first appeared in 2006; it’s powerful than Command Prompt that can be used to automate many different system administration tasks, and of course, for formatting a USB flash drive:

Step 1: Right-click on the Start menu at the lower-left corner and choose Windows PowerShell(Admin).

Step 2: Enter the following command to view the USB flash drive you want to format:

Get-Volume
Format-Volume -DriveLetter F -FileSystem exFAT (Replace F to the exact drive letter of your USB flash drive)

Note: In this method, you should note that after entering the format command, it goes to format the USB flash drive to exFAT directly, and if you want a FAT32 drive, just replace exFAT to FAT32, that’s all.

How to Perform a USB Drive Format on Mac?

Reformatting a USB flash drive in exFAT on Mac is easy than you imagine; we should thank the Disk Utility that can make the reformatting easy to complete; Likewise, follow with the same steps if you would like to reformat an SD card, internal or external hard drive:

Step 1: Connect the USB stick to the PC with one of the USB ports and then press Command + Space to search Disk Utility.

Step 2: After selecting the drive on the left part of the Disk Utility window, click on the Erase button lying at the top of the window.

Step 3: Now, select exFAT from the drop-down menu of the Format.

Step 4: Click the Erase and wait for the reformatting process to complete.

Note: Please back up your data before the formatting of your USB flash drive as Erase will wipe all of the stored data!

What if you were not intended to format the USB flash drive, and there are lots of the vital photos, videos, documents, or any other files stored on the drive that have been lost due to the reformatting. What should we do to retrieve lost data? Don’t worry, a quick format won’t cause all of the data to lose, the file contents still exist on the USB flash drive, and you will have a big chance to get back your dat