Formatting your USB drive is an efficient way to erase all your data, freeing the drive to be used elsewhere. While this is the most common reason people format a USB drive, other use cases exist ...

In the window that opens, right-click on the external hard drive and select Format. Next, choose the file system with which you will format the disk. Note that NTFS is only compatible with Windows; ...

If you’re going to use your USB drive only on Macs, you can format it in HFS+. Linux reads USB drives formatted in HFS+ and believe it or not, Microsoft actually knows how to as well.