how to format wd external hard drive mac

You can also find it in Utilities folder in Applications. Press Enter and Disk Utility will launch. How to Re-Format the External Hard Driveįirst, connect the external hard drive, bring up Spotlight Search by using the keyboard shortcut Cmd + Space and type in Disk Utility. Plus you can’t make partitions bigger than 2 TB or move files larger than 4 GB around. But here you won’t get great support for Time Machine. If you’re like me who also needs to use at least a part of the hard drive from Windows PCs, you’ll need to choose MS-DOS (FAT) format. If you’re only going to use the external hard drive with Macs or you want to use it for Time Machine backups, format it in Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Much like my WD My Passport Ultra, most external hard drives out there are customized to work with Windows, not OS X. If you experience the same issue, your only recourse is to reformat it in one of two formats. Disk Utility showed that it was formatted to MS-DOS (FAT) but I’m pretty sure it would have been NTFS instead. When I first got the hard drive, I wasn’t able to copy anything over to it (but I was able to copy from it).

We recommend exFAT, because it supports files that are over 4GB in size.Why You Need to Re-Format the External Hard Drive You’ll need to make sure your hard disk, SSD or USB drive is formatted using the FAT32 or exFAT file systems – the PS4 doesn’t support the NTFS file system. This is because the PS4 doesn’t encrypt and format the entire drive when making backups – it leaves your hard disk or SSD free to be used for other tasks if you’ve got the space.

If you want to use an external drive to store console backups the process is only a little more complex. Pick the option to Format the drive as extended storage, and the console will take care of the whole process.Īs ever, you do need to remember to use a USB 3.0 product with a capacity between 250GB and 8TB, otherwise the process won’t work. This is because the PS4 uses its own encrypted file system when using a hard drive or SSD as extended storage.Īll you’ve got to do is plug your drive into the console, head to the Settings menu, open Devices, and then USB Storage Devices. If you want to format an external hard drive for PS4, the process couldn’t be much simpler.

How to format wd external hard drive mac