How to Format External Hard Drives

Video Transcript

"This is Zach with Expert Village and today I am going to talk to you about formatting external hard drive. To format your external hard drive in finder you will open up your main hard drive and find your applications in the left payne. Under applications there is a folder called utilities. Opening that folder brings up the list of system utilities including the disc utility. Using the disk utility you can select your hard drive from the list of devices and use the erase tab to pretty much clean up the entire drive and kind of revert it to its brand new state as if it were just out of the box. Reasons for doing this would include if you were selling the drive or giving it to a friend and you wanted to remove all of the data. This is a simple and easy way instead of going in and removing it all by hand. This is also a way to get rid of if you have a file corruption. If you find the data on your external hard drive has become corrupted and if you are worried about the integrity of your disc and its ability to maintain data integrity, you can also use the erase tool to kind of bring it back to a fresh new clean hard drive and usually this is a good way to help if you've got a lot of corrupted data. This is an easy way to remove it all whereas finder might give you problems when you try and go in and remove that data by hand. "