Erase a Hard Drive

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can format an external hard drive. This includes USB flash drives as well. We do this through disk utility. Let’s go to my Mac. Now I’m going to show you how we can reformat a hard drive using an external hard drive that I have, but this also works with external flash drives.

If you were to plug in an external flash drive into your Mac, you’d be able to format it the same way. So now, let’s go and look at all of my external hard drives. I need to go down to the finder. I click on it to open up a new window. And then, in the sidebar under locations, we can see all of my external hard drives.

Again. If I had a USB flash drive, this is where I would also find that USB flash drive. What I want you to do is I want to erase my FW 500 hard drive. So how do we do that? One way of doing that is just by clicking on it and then selecting everything in this hard drive. I go up to edit here, and then we go over to select all.

And then I throw these away in my trash. Once I do that, I empty my trash, and it’ll erase their hard drive, but dependent on how many thousands you have, that could take a while. There’s an easier way to erase a hard drive. You do this through disk utility. Whereas our disutility well, it’s located in our applications folder, and then we have a folder called utilities.

I can also access this through my menu bar when I’m in the finder here. We go over to go, and then we have utilities. Now I select this, it opens up that folder, and you’re going to see an application called disk utility. This is where we erase our hard drives. I’m going to open this up. Now, this may look a little bit different depending on which Mac iOS you’re using.

Disk utility seems to have some minor changes and some major changes in between some of the operating systems. Now I am using maca West Catalina. Again, if you’re using a different Mac OS, it may look a little bit different, but the idea is still the same. What we need to do is we need to go over to the left, and you’re going to see a section here called external.

These are all my external hard drives from here. I select the hard drive that I want to erase. So I go back over to my FW 500, I selected, and now all I need to do is go up to my toolbar, and you’re going to see erase. When I click on this, we have a few options here. Our first option is to name it.

This is where I can name their hard drive. Our next option is where we set how we want to format the hard drive. What do I mean by format in the hard drive? When we erase a hard drive using disk utility, we can also reformat it every hard drive. Doesn’t matter if it’s an SSD hard drive or a standard hard drive is spinning disc drive.

Every hard drive has to be formatted a certain way in order for your computer to read it. When you click on this, you’re going to see a number of different formats. Some of these formats are good for windows. Some of them are good for Mac. Some of them are good for older, hard drives, while some are better for SSD or solid-state drives.

So what are we looking at here? Which one do I want to format it with? Well, if you’re going to share this hard drive with a windows computer, what you may want to use is or MS-DOS. If you format it with X fat or MS-DOS, preferably X fat, this hard can be used on both Macs and windows. MS-DOS is an older format.

It doesn’t handle large files real well, while X-Fat is a newer format and a handles large files and solid-state drives better. On the Mac side, we have the same options. We have Mac OS extended. This is an older format. It’s great for regular drives, but then also Apple introduced a new format a few years ago called APFS.

This one is built for solid-state drives. If you’re going to be sharing files. Between different Macs, you could use either one of these Mac OS Extended or APFS. If it’s a solid-state drive, you may want to use APFS again. If you’re going to be sharing this with windows, what you want to use as X fat, or MS-DOS, preferably X fat.

So now we have to choose what we want to format this one. I’m just going to set it for the latest format. APFS, since I’m using this on my Mac, and I’m using macOS Catalina. So I just set APFS. And now that I’ve set the format, I can format it, which thereby erases the hard drive.

And now, all I need to do is click on erase. And what disutility will do is it’ll reformat the hard drive using the format that I chose. In my case, APFS, thereby erasing the hard drive. In most cases, this will take about a minute or two. The hard drive will disappear from your Mac because it has to unmount it before you can format it.

Once it’s completed formatting, it’ll show back up on your Mac, and you’re able to start using it right away. You are reformatting the hard drive. So if there’s anything on their higher drive that you want to keep. What you’ll want to do is you’ll want to move it off of that hard drive because it is going to erase that hard drive completely.

It’s going to completely wipe it out. So anything you have on that hard drive that you are formatting is going to be gone. Make sure that there is nothing on their hard drive that you want to keep before you format it. And then I’ll end with this also works great for flash drives. USB flash drives the Mac, looks at a USB flash drive as just another external hard drive.

So you can plug in your flash, drive to your Mac, go into disc utility, and reformatted as well. So that’s how you format an external hard drive on the Mac with disc utility. You open up disk utility, select the disc, you onto format, click on erase, and then choose how you want to format it. When you do format it, it does erase everything on that hard drive.

And again, this also works great for flash drives. So that’s how you erase external hard drives on the Mac using disc utility.