Formatting External Hard Drive for Mac

One of the best ways of wiping a hard drive clean and to eliminate any computer virus problem affecting it, is to format it. Brand new external hard drives need to be formatted to be able to write or read any data on it. If you are a recent migrant to Mac computers or Mac OS X, chances are, that you are not familiar with the procedure. When you have switched over from Windows, Mac OS X takes some time to get used to.

With several gigabytes of data generated every day in the form of pictures, work files, movies and music, the limited hard drive space on your MacBook or Macintosh computer is never enough. Buying a 1 TB or 500 GB hard drive is not a luxury but a necessity. There is no recommended external hard drive for Mac. There are more than one choices. Make sure that you settle for nothing less than the best external hard drive. To be able to use it, one of the first things which you must do is get it formatted.

Hard Drive Formatting

When you buy the external hard drive, it is in reformatted or raw condition. To be able to use it, it may need to be partitioned and installed with a file access system. This file system creates a registry of addresses with physical memory sectors on the hard drive, which is used when writing and retrieving data later. The drive needs to be partitioned into volumes for ease of usage if user feels the need to divide it into different logical subunits. Let us see how formatting is done on Mac OS X in the following section.

Procedure for External Hard Drive Formatting on a Mac

Formatting or reformatting hard drives is quite a simple procedure. Formatting internal or external hard drives on Mac is handled by a single program, specifically designed for this purpose. It is called 'Disk Utility'. Some of the functions of this program include mounting and unmounting disks, creation of disk images, partitioning drives and of course formatting or 'erasing' a drive as it is referred to in Mac lingo.

A recently added feature of this program, since Mac OS X Snow Leopard version was launched, is the facility to resize any of existing partitions. Let me now explain the formatting procedure for external hard drives, using Disk Utility.

Open the utility program and you will see a list of all the existing hard drive partitions and removable data storage media connected with your Mac. Using a USB cable, attach the external hard drive with your Mac. You will immediately see it listed on the left hand side.

To format the whole drive, first select it. From among the many tabs you see in the program, click on the one which says 'Erase'. Once you select the option, you will be asked to choose the kind of file formatting system that you intend to use on the external hard drive.

The default and also the recommended choice is 'Mac OS X Journal', which is specifically designed for Mac systems. Select the file system and then give the 'Erase' command, by clicking on the appropriate button. The formatting will begin immediately and should be done in a few minutes.

Learning formatting is simple because the 'Disk Utility' program has an intuitive interface. It has been created for the non specialist user. All you really have to do is make a choice of the correct file system and the program does the rest. Once formatted, your external hard drive is ready for use on your Mac. With the proper file system installed, accessing your stored external hard drive data and copying any data from your Mac hard drive is made possible.