Format USB Drive on Mac Using Disk Utilityĭisk Utility is an built-in program available for macOS users to manage the storage devices on Mac. If you are switching from a Mac to Windows PC or vice versa it’s a good idea to format your USB drive to change its file format for better compatibility.īut before you format a USB drive, you should remember to back up your data on cloud storage like iCloud, Google Drive or OneDrive. If you have a limited number of USB drives, formatting one of them will give you the peace of mind for storing more data when required. If you use a USB drive frequently for transferring or storing your data, you should consider formatting it to remove files you no longer require. This post will show you the two best ways to format a USB drive on Mac. We recommend it to anyone who uses flash drives.Formatting a USB drive on your Mac can easily be done using the built-in apps. HP's little tool is the USB flash drive tool that could, bringing enhanced power and capability to your Windows system at no cost. We then moved the data back to the newly reformatted drive, ejected it, reinserted it, and verified that everything was in order, including our portable apps. Clicking Close called up a small dialog with detailed information about the drive. We allowed it to proceed, and it formatted the drive in seconds.

We clicked Start, and a pop-up warned us all data on the drive would be lost. We chose to reformat it in NTFS and enable compression. HP USB immediately identified it and its file type, FAT.

We moved the data off of an older 1GB flash drive and inserted the drive in an open USB port. Other than Start and Close buttons, that's it, not even a Help file, though this tool is easy enough to figure out without one. This compact tool has an equally compact interface, an efficient little dialog with selections for Device and File system, and an entry field for Volume label, and check boxes for format options, including the ability to create a bootable DOS start-up disk using either internal system files or files at a location you can specify. Hewlett-Packard's USB Disk Storage Format Tool can quickly and thoroughly format virtually any USB flash drive in a wide range of file systems as well as create bootable USB media. You can even boot from flash drives, just like the old floppies, which, together with portability, universal compatibility, and enough space to host useful tools, makes them ideal recovery devices. USB flash drives are this century's floppies, holding everything from personal and medical information to music and pictures and even secure data, with the added advantage of being small and rugged enough for keychain duty.

Usb disk storage format tool mac