Similar to Windows 10, you can format USB drives on Mac using Disk Utility app. In order to write on the USB drive on Mac, you need to format the device into Apple supported file systems like APFS or Mac OS Extended. Though you can mount the drive to view and copy the content, you can’t write on the drive. Unfortunately you can’t use the Windows formatted USBs on your Mac for saving content.

Windows supports file systems like NTFS and FAT for formatting drives. So, there are many situations you would like to erase all the content on your USB and format it like a new one. USB devices are prone to damage and file corruptions due to usage on multiple computers.

You can format both internal and external drives in Windows 10. However, the file system is not supported by many older systems.Formatting is the term used in Windows operating system to erase all content in the drive and make it to initial state. In theory, data capacity of up to 2 TB is possible, but Microsoft has limited the partition size in newer systems to 32 GB in order to promote the modern NFTS format.ĮxFAT is a further development of FAT that in principle offers unattainable storage and data capacity. The maximum data size is limited to 4 GB in the latest version FAT32. It is not supported by many applications.įAT is a file system developed by Microsoft that is also supported by Linux and macOS. Mac OS Extended (Journaled) with the addition that the file system can differentiate between upper and lower case (e.g.

HFS+ or Mac OS Extended (case-sensitive and journaled) Windows/Linux devices are only able to read but not write on USB sticks in this format. A file system developed by Apple that is particularly suited to data media with large memory capacity.

How to format usb drive in a mac