The brand-new disk you purchase might not be formatted to the file system type you need.
Still many users would like to format the external hard drives and people do that due to various reasons: Why do you want to format an external hard drive?Ī brand-new external hard drive is usually partitioned into s single partition with NTFS file system. You should create a backup for important data before formatting if the disk contains significant files. The formatting process removes all data on the partition and thus causes data loss. Regardless of the brand or model, the first thing you may need to do after purchasing an external hard drive might be partitioning and formatting it.įormatting external disk can be done via various methods and it can be formatted to a range of file system so that you can use the disk under different operating system platforms. You can connect external hard drive to computer via USB cable and then transfer data with internal hard drive.
About formatting external hard driveĮxternal hard drive is popular storage device and it can be used to store all kinds of digital information such as images, documents, apps, emails, etc. This article shows you how to format an external hard drive via different methods, and you can follow these methods to format external hard drive for PC, Mac or Linux.