Plug in your flash drive. Now open the Finder and look for your USB device. You don’t need to do anything special to know your flash drive’s file system.

Before you format a flash drive it is suggested to know what file system your flash drive is in. HFS filesystem is modified into HFS plus (Modernly called as MacOS Extended).

HFS stands for Hierarchical File System.Īpple introduced this file system in 1985 to replace the existing Macintosh File System or MFS. Here, pop-ups the question: How to format a flash drive on a mac? If you want to use your flash drive solely for MacOS, it is highly recommended to format your flash drive. Extra work is needed to use NTFS on MacOS. The latter one, NTFS is mostly used on the Windows operating system and not an optimal option for MacOS. That’s the reason why most of the flash drives in the market are available in Fat32 or NTFS formats which are the most preferred format for windows.Īlthough the first one, Fat32 is completely compatible with both MacOS as well as Windows, it has some limitations. Fat32 can store files only up to 4 GB of size. In contrast, only 27.4% of users use MacOS, obviously for their apple computer. Majority of 49.4% of desktop and laptop computer users in the world use Windows operating system. Not only this, we will help you pick the best file system for your usb flash drive that you are planning to use on a Mac. This simple guide will teach you How to Format a Flash Drive on Mac.