Although your Mac comes with a hard drive built-in, knowing how to format an external hard drive on macOS will widen your options. As well as giving you more space to play with, an external hard drive can also back up your Mac’s data. This will give you extra peace of mind because, while you could use one of the best cloud backup services, nothing really beats also having a physical copy of your data to hand should something go wrong.
To that end, you’ll want to grab one of the best external hard drives, perhaps going for the biggest capacity you can afford (or, at the very least, the one which best suits your needs). In general, that’s going to be a super-fast SSD-based drive using the speedy USB 3.0 standard. Everything else you need to format comes built into your Mac. So let’s get started and learn how to format an external drive on macOS.
