Many of us rely on external USB drives and storage devices, whether hard drives or flash drives, to transfer large files and to serve as backups for things like Time Machine. Typically when you buy a new hard drive or USB drive, even if for a Mac, it comes pre-formatted in a Windows friendly format like exFAT or FAT32, rather than Mac file system like HFS+. This isn’t a problem however, as you can easily format a USB drive to be fully Mac compatible.

The process to erase and format a a USB drive is the same regardless of whether the drive is a USB hard drive,…