Monday Productivity Pointers

- [Instructor] In this week's Monday Productivity Pointers I want to talk about formatting external drives for both Mac and Windows. And what I'm talking about here is mostly relevant for external hard drives and USB memory sticks. The format of a drive establishes how files are written to and read from a drive. There are a variety of reasons why you might choose one drive format over another. Some formats allow for larger files, some allow the drive to run faster, but the biggest factor is that some formats only work on Windows and some only work on Mac.

So to start with let's see how you can identify the current format of a drive. I have a USB memory stick on this computer, so if I go into File Explorer I can see that USB memory stick is represented here, it's drive E, it's called UNTITLED. What I want to do is right-click on that drive and go to Properties and make sure I'm in the General tab. Here I can get a bunch of information about this drive. I can see how much space is available, how much has been used, and I can see the File system, which is another way of saying the format of the drive.

So this drive is formatted as FAT32. That's one of the possible options for drive format. Now if I go over to the internal hard drive on this computer, that's the one labeled C drive. I'm going to right-click on that one and go to Properties and let's compare our information. Here on the C drive, the internal drive, the File system is NTFS, so it has a different file system. We'll talk more about that, but for the moment let's jump over to a Macintosh computer and look at some similar information.

So here on the Macintosh I also have a USB memory stick connected, so if I go into Finder I can see that USB memory stick is here, it's called UNTITLED. If I right-click on the USB memory stick and I choose Get Info I can see similar information, including the Format of the drive. This one is also formatted as FAT32. Now let's go to the main hard drive here on the Mac, and that's just going to be called Macintosh HD. I'll right-click on that one and Get Info and we'll compare the information here.

And this drive is formatted as Mac OS Extended Journaled. So now we've seen three possible formats for storage drives. We saw FAT 32, NTFS, and Mac OS Extended. Of course, there are other options, but we can really simplify things by just talking about these three options. So the Mac OS Extended format is the default format for drives on a Macintosh and the Mac OS Extended format cannot be read or written to on a Windows computer.

So if I were to connect a Mac OS Extended drive to a Windows computer I would not be able to use it unless I erased everything and reformatted that drive. Now NTFS is the default format for Windows. Mac computers can read NTFS drives, but they cannot write to them. So you're not able to save changes or copy new files to an NTFS drive if you connect it to a Mac. Some people think that Apple will one day add NTFS support in the future, but as of Mac OS Sierra NTFS only works as read only on the Macintosh.

And to be completely honest, there are utilities that you can install to work with Mac OS format on Windows or NTFS format on Mac, but that takes some extra setup. What I want to focus on is the typical scenarios. So to simplify, NTFS only works on Windows, Mac OS Extended only works on Mac, and then there's that FAT32, which will work on both. So if you have an external hard drive or a USB memory stick that you want to use on both a Mac computer and a Windows computer then FAT32 is a great option.

That's why most external hard drives and almost all USB memory sticks will come pre-formatted as FAT32 when you buy them. But consider this, reading and writing files on a FAT32 drive is significantly slower than a Mac OS or an NTFS drive. So if you are doing work that requires really fast read and write speeds then you may want to reformat your external hard drive or your USB memory stick.

Also, FAT32 will not let you store any single file that is larger than four gigabytes in size. It's pretty rare to have a file that's larger than four gigabytes, but if you work with high definition video it is certainly possible. So at some point you might need to reformat an external drive. It's a bit more rare to reformat a USB memory stick, but it works the same whether you're using a hard drive, an SSD, or a USB memory stick. Let's do it on Windows first. So here on the Windows computer let me just close the two windows that I have open here and we're going to use my USB memory stick as an example.

I'm going to right-click on it, and here in this right-click menu there's an option for Format, so I'll click on that. So I'm just going to set a few things. I'm not going to change the Capacity of the drive, you're not able to change the Capacity, this is just some information, but I can choose the File system. And if I open up this menu I see those options. So right now it's formatted as FAT32. If for some reason I wanted to format it as NTFS I could select that. Then you can give it a name. You don't have to change the name, but you can if you want.

I'm going to call this Nick USB. And that's all you really need to do. But there's also this option for a Quick Format. What's that all about? Well, a normal format does detailed checks on the drive and actually writes blank data. If you just got a brand new hard drive the full format will let you know if there are any problems with the drive. The Quick Format doesn't do that. Also, if there are files on the drive and you do the Quick Format it does delete everything on the drive, but it does not overwrite anything on top of those deleted files.

So it's more likely that somebody could recover old data from a drive that was formatted with the Quick Format option. So if you want to be more secure, like if you're giving away or selling a drive, then you might want to format that drive with the Quick Format option turned off as a way to completely wipe the drive. Remember, when you format a drive it will erase all of the files on that drive. So be real careful with that, make sure that you are willing to wipe out everything on the drive before you format it.

OK, so choose your format, give it a name, choose whether you want the Quick Format, and then all you need to do is hit Start. I'm going to confirm that I'm OK with erasing everything, so I'll hit OK, and because I chose the Quick Format option this will go pretty quickly. And after a moment I can see that the format process is complete, I can hit OK, I can Close this, and now I have a completely empty reformatted drive that I can start working with.

OK, so that's Windows. Now let's switch over to the Mac and see how to format a drive there. I'm going to close these two windows and I'm going to stick with the USB memory stick I have connected to this computer. On a Mac you cannot format a drive just by right-clicking on it. Instead you'll need to launch an application and that application is called Disk Utility. So I'm going to go to Launchpad, I'll do a quick search for Disk Utility, there it is, and I'll launch that. So here in Disk Utility I can select the drive over here on the left side, that's my USB DISK, and here I do not see an option for format, but I do see an option for Erase.

Remember, formatting a drive will erase all of the data on that drive. There's no way to change the format without erasing a drive, so the Mac just calls that process Erase. So let's do that. I'll hit Erase and I have similar options here. So I'm going to give it a Name, then I can go to Format and I can choose what format I want. Remember, FAT32 is the format that will work on both Mac and Windows, but we do not see that here on this list. So if you do want to format a drive for FAT32 you should do that on a Windows computer.

But from here I can select some other options. So if I know I'm only going to use this memory stick on a Macintosh and I want it to run as fast as possible then I could select Mac OS Extended. And that's it. Then I'll hit Erase and I'll let it go through the process. So now you should be able to format your external hard drive or USB memory stick using the file system format that best suits your needs. And that does it for this week's Monday Productivity Pointers. We'll see you next time.