Formatting Mac’s Volume is conceptually the same as deleting it. The major difference is that you will select a drive, not a volume, from the list of hard drives shown on your Mac Machine.
If you really want to format, then I would like to recommend that – formatting process will take a little longer time than the basic erase method applied in Mac machines.
Mac Disk Utility supports various capacities, all including at least one disks, volumes, or partitions.
Utilizing Disk Utility Mac to format a drive, paying little mind to the sort. It doesn’t make a difference if it’s an internal or external disk, or if it’s a hard drive or a SSD.
A matter of thing,
Before stepping into formatting process, make sure you have proper backup of data existing on that drive which you’ve decided to format. If you don’t own data backup, then do it now without any second thoughts.
If you’re all set, then let’s get started with the steps of formatting Mac hard disk,
Where to find Disk Utility?
Instead of digging deeper into your Mac system, open ‘Application’ folder and then you can see ‘Utilities’ folder. Now select ‘Disk Utility’ option (you can also get it in Finder).
Getting Started
Once if you find OS X Disk Utility, you can start formatting Mac hard drive by following below mentioned steps –
Launch Disk Utility – Once it is opened, from the left-hand pane, you can see a list of drives and volumes connected to your Mac, select the drive you wish to format. The selected drive’s information will be displayed.
Choose your format option – Mac’s Disk Utility will automatically choose OS X Extended (Journaled) option as the most common and default for the drive format, if you’d like to use something else, then click on the Formatting options to check its drop-down window. Other format options you will see are:
- OS X Extended (Journaled)
- OS X Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
- OS X Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)
- OS X Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled, Encrypted)
- MS-DOS (FAT)
- ExFat
Piece of Info – For external drives on Mac, it almost always makes sense to format in ExFAT format option.
Name your drive – Once if you choose the drive to format, you will now need to give the disk a name. This can be anything you wish. Select ‘GUID Partition Table’ on the options window.
Choose Security option – This Options sheet will display multiple secure erase options, one is Fastest and other is Most Secure.
Fastest will erase the drive by removing the drive header information, but will leave the underlying files intact, although they will be in hidden mode. This means you or someone else could resurrect the files easily using result oriented Mac Data Recovery Software, which isn’t necessarily a good idea.
For a fresh install of OS X, we’d recommend you move the slider to the second option where it says “This option writes a single pass of zeros over the entire disk.” Most Secure option will overwrite the entire drive seven times at once.
Finally – Time to click on “Erase” button. Formatting a drive can take a while depending on the size and amount of data stored in it. Progress bar will show how the formatting of your Mac hard drive is going and how long it will take to complete.
Once the procedure is finished, you can do whatever you like with the Mac hard drive!!
