- Best Hard Drive Formatting Software
- Best Hard Drive Formatting Software Mac Free
- How To Format Hard Drive For Mac
- Mac Formatting Software
- Best Hard Drive Formatting Software Mac Download
- Best Hard Drive Format For Mac
How to Format a New or Second Hard Drive on Mac Mac is obviously a very much different operating system from Windows, let alone their features and steps to format a hard drive. Therefore, it is necessary to present a tutorial guide here to format or partition a hard drive within Mac OS.
- Possible Solutions to Format Hard Drive on Mac 1. How to Format External Hard Drive/Disk on Mac using Disk Utility? If you are using an external hard drive, or even an SD Card or a USB stick, make sure that it is properly connected to your computer via the appropriate port. Once you have made sure of this, go to Applications then Utilities.
- Format an External Hard Drive. External hard drives use either spinning disks or solid memory to save your files. On Mac computers, use the Finder app to browse and manage files on your computer and external hard drives. Before a hard drive can read or write.
Jun 08, 2020 • Filed to: Answer Hard Drive Problems • Proven solutions
It is never too late to learn how to format a new or second hard drive on your Mac or Windows 10. Now you are in luck as we will prepare you with this tactics in advance.
It is not rare to see people coming and asking how to format their new or second hard drive on Mac or Windows either for freeing up space or for making hard drives to be compatible with a new operating system. As speaking of this, it is essential to grasp the key steps to format your new or second hard drive. Before that, we will walk you through the reasons why or when you need to format new or second hard drives. Read on to discover more!
Part 1. Do You Need to Format a New or Second Hard Drive
To begin with, do you need to format a new hard drive? The answer is positive as formatting a new hard drive is the very first step before you start to use the new hard drive, isn’t it? Basically, the gesture to format a new drive means so much to users because it signifies the note that this new drive is working correctly, completely clean, and free of malware or malicious code that may potentially harm your installation and personal files. Now you see when you buy a new hard drive, you need to make sure the drive is functioning well and it is clean.
What about second or used hard drives? Honestly, formatting second or used hard drives will help avoid a lot of issues or compatibility problems, especially when they were previously connected to a different operating system.
In short, formatting a new or second hard drive brings evident benefits to users as listed below.
- Tidy up your drive and free up space.
- Eliminate virus, conflicts, or else from the existing drive.
- Remove any potential malware or malicious code.
- Erase any information on the used drive so that your operating system can read data from, and write data to, the drive.
- Improve system performance.
- Save money.
If you are going to format a new or second hard drive, keep in mind the following tips.
- Be 100% sure to back up your data before taking any action. This is especially vital to used hard drives. Otherwise, you may need to turn to professional software to recover the data lost during formatting.
- Makes sure your PC is fully charged as formatting or partitioning will take some time to finish.
Part 2. How to Format a New or Second Hard Drive in Windows 10
Formatting a drive may vary in terms of different operating systems, like Windows and Mac. Although in principal, formatting means to erase existing data and free up space for utilization, the procedures are not exactly the same for Mac and Windows.
In specific, if you want to know how to format a new or second hard drive in Windows 10, don’t miss the step-by-step instruction here.
Check your hard drive and categorize it as partitioned or non-partitioned beforehand. For a drive that has been configured with a partition, simply go through the formatting steps here to make a fresh drive.
Step 1: Open Disk Management
Type in disk management from the quick search box or directly move to the administrative tools to locate the disk management. Launch Disk Management.
Step 2: Right click to format the drive
Now that you've found the drive you want to format, right-click it and choose Format to open the disk-formatting wizard.
Tips: Before you actually format the hard drive, you may click and open the drive to make sure this is exactly the drive you want to erase data and make a fresh drive.
Heads-up here! When you fail to locate the drive to format, or you see that an Initialize Disk window appears, it probably means that the hard drive is new and it’s never been partitioned yet. In this case you have to partition the drive beforehand as partitioning is something that must be done before a hard drive is formatted. Let me walk you through a brief procedure to partition your hard drive.
Step 1: Open Disk Management
![Best hard drive formatting software mac free Best hard drive formatting software mac free](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126215008/165381964.jpg)
Best Hard Drive Formatting Software
Use the command line to enter the disk management interface, where you will see a pop-up windows indicating 'You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it.'
Step 2: Choose a style
Besides, choose a partition style based on the hard drive size. If it is larger than 2TB, choose GPT, otherwise choose MBR. Click OK to proceed.
Step 3: Locate the drive to partition and select a space for the partitioning
From the Disk Management window, tap the hard drive to partition and right click to choose New Simple Volume.
Step 4: Proceed to the partitioning wizard
On the pop-up windows, click Next to proceed according to the partitioning wizard. You will see a window asking you to verify the partition choices from the Completing the New Simple Volume Wizard screen. Once you have verified all the choices, click Finish to complete the partitioning.
This is the end of your partitioning a hard drive before you actually take steps to format the hard drive. Note that in Windows 10, these procedures are easy to follow just like the other Windows systems with only minor differences in terms of the user interface.
Part 3. How to Format a New or Second Hard Drive on Mac
Mac is obviously a very much different operating system from Windows, let alone their features and steps to format a hard drive. Therefore, it is necessary to present a tutorial guide here to format or partition a hard drive within Mac OS.
Step 1: Launch Disk Utility from the launch pad on Mac or find disk utility from Finder
Open your Finder and enter “disk utility” on the quick search bar to locate the Disk Utility icon. Or start launchpad and find the disk utility from launchpad.
Step 2: Locate the drive from the Disk Utility window
Click on the target hard drive from the sidebar on the left and you will see the details of this drive on the right pane, such as disk image volume, and a few buttons on top of the window.
Step 3: Erase the data on the drive
Tap on the Erase button from the function tab on the top of the window.
Step 4: Choose Mac OS extended for the volume format menu
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On the displayed window, choose Mac OS extended for the volume format menu and you may name the hard drive on the Name box. Then, click the Erase button below to kick off the process, which will take a few minutes only.
Similar to formatting a hard drive, if you want to partition your hard drive due to various reasons, such as creating two OS within one box or saving space for data backup, you may follow steps here to partition the hard drive. The steps to partition a hard drive resemble to those of formatting a hard drive except the part of erasing data. In terms of partitioning a hard drive, when you navigate to the drive window, check for the volume information of the hard drive in advance.
Next, tap on the Partition button on the top of the window, where a window will pop up to let you specify the number of partitions, volume of each partition, and the name of these partitions. When all these settings are done, click Apply to move on to partition the hard drive eventually.
Tips: It is never too late to emphasize the importance of backing up your data before you format or partition your hard drive. You cannot be too cautious during data backup. We all don’t want to see or hear any data loss. That is sad, isn’t it? What if that happens? Can we have a remedy solution to get the data back? Absolutely yes.
![Best Hard Drive Formatting Software Mac Best Hard Drive Formatting Software Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126215008/223443542.jpg)
Recoverit Mac Data Recovery is the very tool to help you get back your data that has been lost accidentally or the data you forget to backup beforehand. With it, you may relax a little bit because it will help you recover your data completely, no matter for a crashed drive or for accidental deletion of data.
To do so, you may follow the tutorial guide here.
Step 1: Locate the target drive
Launch Recoverit on your PC and locate the drive to scan. Note that once you open Recoverit, it will automatically display all available drives and you just need to select the target drive to recover data. Click the Start button at the bottom to proceed.
Step 2: Scan the file location
On the left pane, there will be two categories, namely file type and file path, both of which are created to help users with tracking down to specific files to recover. As soon as the scan ends, there will be a preview of your lost files on the right pane.
Step 3: Preview and recover formatted data
Select the target files by ticking the check boxes in front of the file name on the left pane and click Recover at the bottom to kick off the process. It is recommended that you save the recovered data files to a new drive once the whole process completes.
Closing Words
Formatting a new or second hard drive is usual. The routine procedure may differ a little bit for different operating systems, such as Windows and Mac OS. However, it is essential to follow two major steps for any systems, data backup, format/parition, respectively. That being said, you need to bear in mind that no matter for formatting or partitioning a hard drive, data backup is a must.
The last but certainly not the least, if you lose the data by accident, you may turn to free data recovery software - Recoverit for help. It will surely do the best to recover your deleted or lost files from your PC, hard drive, USB drive, SD card, mobile phone, as well as other removable devices on Windows and Mac.
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If you want to format a hard drive or USB flash drive on your computer, disk formatting tool is the best choice. In this article, we will introduce 5 disk formatting tools for Windows and Mac to help you securely format hard drive/USB flash drive or memory card on a PC or a Mac. Just read on.
Top 5 Disk Formatting Tool for Windows/Mac
How To Format Hard Drive For Mac
When you format a hard drive, you may worry about two things: 1. whether the formatting process takes very long time to complete; 2 whether the formatting operation would cause damage or shorten the service life of the hard drive. Don't worry, the top 5 disk formatting tools bellow are 100% safe disk formatting tool for Windows or Mac OS. They will efficiently format hard drive or external device under Windows or Mac OS. And they will never cause any damage to your hard drive or shorten the service life of the hard drive/SSD/USB flash drive, etc.
No.1 disk formatting tool for Windows and Mac – Built-in Formatting tool
Both Windows and Mac OS offer built-in disk formatting tool. For Windows, it offers quick format feature when you right-click the hard drive on the computer. If you are using a Mac, you can run the built-in Disk Utility to quickly format a hard drive or external hard drive under Mac OS. However, the formatted data can be recovered by data recovery software.
Mac Formatting Software
No.2 disk formatting tool for Windows and Mac – AweEraser
AweEraser is a secure data eraser. It can help you format a hard drive and permanently erase all data on the hard drive, beyond the scope of data recovery. Two versions are available: AweEraser for Windows, AweEraser for Mac. Just free download it here:
If you are going to sell/donate or recycle your hard drive/storage media device, you can run AweEraser on a PC or Mac. Then use this tool 'Erase Hard Drive' to format and erase the hard drive/storage media. Once the hard drive is formatted by AweEraser, the data is permanently lost, can't be recovered by data recovery software.
No.3 disk formatting tool for Windows and Mac – Stellar Disk Wipe
This tool can help in formatting hard drive, USB flash drive, memory card and other storage media under Windows or Mac OS. This hard disk formatting software can help you format/wipe your entire hard drive in a single step. The software includes powerful as well as fast wiping algorithms that erase unwanted data from the hard drive permanently.
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No.4 disk formatting tool for Windows and Mac – Super Eraser
Super Eraser is another data eraser for Windows/Mac. It also can help you format the hard drive and permanently erase data from the formatted hard drive. It also can selectively erase data from a hard drive or external device.
Best Hard Drive Format For Mac
No.5 disk formatting tool for Windows and Mac – Paragon Disk Wiper
Paragon Disk Wipe allows you to create a bootable USB-flash drive or external hard drive that will help you to completely erase a whole hard disk, a separate partition or just clean free space. It is the reliable disk formatting tool for Windows/Mac. After formatting, the data will be permanently lost.
The top 5 disk formatting tools for Windows and Mac can help you securely format hard drive or external device under Windows/Mac OS. AweEraser is the outstanding one among the 5 disk formatting tools. It will securely format the hard drive and permanently erase the data. Then your hard drive is able to donated, resold, lent, or abandoned.