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This article was co-written by Luigi Oppido. Luigi Oppido is the owner and operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. He has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, antivirus and upgrade.
This article has been viewed 5,162 times.
This wikiHow teaches you how to select, connect, and format an external hard drive on your Windows or Mac computer.
Steps
Select external hard drive
- The formatting process is quite quick, you can proceed through the built-in settings on the machine.
- USB 3.0 — Rectangular port found on most computers manufactured before 2017. Most external hard drives use a USB 3.0 connector.
- USB-C — The oval port found on MacBooks and some Microsoft laptops. If your device uses a USB-C port, you’ll need to purchase a USB 3.0 to USB-C adapter or find an external hard drive with a USB-C cable.
- In general, a 1 TB (1024 GB) hard drive is not much more expensive than a 512 GB capacity. Memory tends to be more expensive (for example, a 2 TB hard drive costs a lot less than two 1 TB hard drives).
- Western Digital
- Adata
- Buffalo
- Seagate
- Samsung
Luigi Oppido
Computer repair technician
Luigi Oppido is the owner and operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. He has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, antivirus and upgrade.
Computer repair technician
Our experts say: When choosing an external hard drive, you should buy from a well-known drive manufacturer like Seagate or Western Digital. Don’t be fooled and spend money on hard drives with fancy exteriors but low quality insides. If you plan to back up important information to this drive, make sure this is an effective choice.
Installing an external hard drive on Windows
- Make sure you plug the external hard drive into the USB port on the computer itself, and not the hub or the keyboard USB port.
. Click the File Explorer app with the folder icon at the bottom of your desktop.
- If you don’t see the File Explorer app icon, press ⊞ Win + E to open File Explorer.
- If there’s nothing under the “Devices and drives” heading, you’ll need to double-click the title to expand it.
- NTFS — Select this option if you only want to use the hard drive on your Windows computer.
- exFAT — Select this option if you want to use the hard drive on both Windows and Mac computers.
- FAT32 — Select this option if you want to use the hard drive with computers and other similar sources. Some computers or Linux installations will require a FAT32 drive.
- If the drive belongs to someone before it reaches you, consider unchecking the “Quick format” box first. As such, the formatting process will take significantly longer, but the hard drive will be completely overwritten.
Install an external hard drive on Mac
. Click the Spotlight app with the magnifying glass icon in the upper-right corner of the screen.
- Mac OS Extended (Journaled) — Select this option if you only want to use the external hard drive on your Mac.
- ExFAT — Select this option if you want to use the external hard drive on both Windows and Mac computers.
Advice
- Many other devices (besides computers) that allow an external hard drive (for example, game consoles) will provide the format in the Storage section of the Settings menu.
- Don’t forget to safely disconnect the external hard drive before unplugging the cable from the computer. This operation is to ensure that the data on the hard drive is saved.
Warning
- Not all file systems are compatible with every computer. If you choose to use a proprietary file system (for example, NTFS for Windows) you will get an error when you try to add this external hard drive to a computer running another operating system.
- Formatting will erase all content on the drive.
This article was co-written by Luigi Oppido. Luigi Oppido is the owner and operator of Pleasure Point Computers in Santa Cruz, California. He has over 25 years of experience in general computer repair, data recovery, antivirus and upgrade.
This article has been viewed 5,162 times.
This wikiHow teaches you how to select, connect, and format an external hard drive on your Windows or Mac computer.
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