Select System and Security > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. Click the Start menu and open Control Panel from the context menu. Connect your external hard drive to your PC via a USB cable. It is available to Windows 10/8/7/XP/Vista. Then follow the easy steps below to format your external hard drive.
We will tell you how to perform external hard drive format quickly. To use it on a Mac computer, you have to format it to HFS or FAT32. Be default, external hard drives are sold in NTFS, which is designed for Windows. However, hard drives advertised as being compatible with Windows and MacOS may have misled you into thinking you can use a hard drive cross-platform.įormatting external hard drive is a useful skill if you have one. According to a recent survey, people are more likely to use external hard drive to expand storage space for their digital devices, compared to other storage media.