Most external hard drives sold as of September 2012 come preformatted and ready to use. However, there may be times when you'll need to initialize an external hard drive, either because the drive ...

How to format (initialize) a new internal hard drive If you just built a PC, or added a brand new hard drive or SSD to an existing computer, you have to format it before you can actually store ...

If you need a USB drive that's widely compatible with different devices, you may want to format it to FAT32. Here's how to do so on Mac and PC.

The Disk Management snap-in in Computer Management displays available storage devices connected to the PC. Using this you can initialize, format or partition hard disks, among other tasks.

Despite the popularity of AirDrop, cloud services and email, the most convenient way to share files is sometimes with a thumb drive. See how to format a drive to work with Windows PCs and Macs.

With iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, Apple has introduced the option to format storage devices, including hard disks, USB drives, and SD cards.

Mac 911 How to format a USB thumb drive for both Mac and Windows The Mac/Windows-compatible ExFat format allows larger file sizes than the old FAT32.