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How To Format A Hard Drive

Learning how to format a hard drive is easy. There are two good ways to do it for most situations and both are menu driven from any windows or Mac computer.

Not sure why but many users run right of the rails over formatting a hard drive. Back in the old days (before Windows XP) you needed to format a hard drive before installing any operating system. That's really not necessary unless you have a special reason (like totally cleaning the hard drive of previous data).

Almost all hard drive manufacturers offer free utilities to format their drives (and some like Seagate's often work on any hard drive). This would be the best choice if for some reason yu wanted to really clean the data off the hard drive. But in most other cases you can use any working Windows or Mac computer to do the formatting. This is especially true of any external hard drive but internal hard drives too.

On the Mac computer you use the Mac Disk Utility, on the Windows computer you can use the Disk Management tool. I'm not going to go into great detail on step by step instructions since all you have to do is hit the help key in either program and they will tell you exactly how to format your hard drive. If you want an in-depth explanation of either one you can go here for the Mac: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/formatting_hd_mac_stone.html. And here for the Windows: http://www.top-windows-tutorials.com/format-hard-drive.html.

In both scenarios you can format a hard drive with a few clicks of the menu buttons. Your best choice for Windows machines is to use NTFS (there are two choices, NTFS and FAT32). There are two formats that are most commonly used on the Mac: Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and Mac OS Extended (journaled not selected). The format you choose is based on how you will use the hard drive, if for boot or system drives then the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is the best choice. If using the drive as an external or usb drive then the Mac OS Extended, (journaled not selected), is the best choice. The reason being that the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) runs at a slower speed for operating system chores.

If you are going to use an external drive for multiple operating systems, FAT32 would be best since it's compatible for both the Mac and Windows computers. FAT32 does have some limitations you might want to be aware of such as volume sizes, security, and file sizes but in most cases that's not an issue.

The usual situation for most people is they have a hard drive that has failed or is now too small to hold all of their data. Replacement internal and external hard drives are the reason most people want to know how to format a hard drive. In the external hard drive case, most if not all, come formatted in FAT32. No need to format them but if you want to convert to NTFS on a Windows computer, you do the same way as in the new hard drive format instructions or just right click the hard drive in Windows Explorer and tell it to convert the hard drive to NTFS. Same goes for the Mac if you want to change to the Mac OS Extended (Journaled not selected).

On internal hard drives that you plan on installing an operating system, you don't need to pre-format the hard drive. The installation process allows you to both partition (divide the physical hard drive into different sections) and format during the installation process. It's just a matter of making choices on the installation menus. Why would someone divide the hard drive into different sections?

Well, in the old days you could have situations that you put the operating system on one partition and the data on another. This makes it easy to backup and restore to new or additional hard drives. In these days, you can get up to 3 Terabyte hard drives so space is not so much an issue. And for most users, it's no big deal. But if you want to do it, go ahead since it won't effect performance much and there's no real downside for day to day use..

The bottom line is that you are often better off letting the operating system format a new hard drive if you are doing a clean install. If an external hard drive, just use the computer you have to format in the best method for the drive and your possible uses. So the whole process on how to format a hard drive can be as simple as making a few menu choices whether your installing the operating system or want to clean up an external hard drive.

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