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So-called "low level formatting" is a myth at this point.Ĭomplicating this myth is that there exist tools that claim to be able to do it. New hard drives come with their entire surface ready-to-use and there is no longer any way to alter it this at a low level or to initialize it in any way. Once upon a time hard drives came without their pattern of tracks and sectors laid out on the disk yet and you did this yourself using a software tool. It's safe to interrupt a full format before it has finished and then perform a quick format. If you want your format to take only a matter of seconds, choose a quick format. There are some claims that it "exercises" or "freshens" the drive surface, but this is largely superstition and doesn't take into account the way the drive works. It also may detect some kinds of errors on the drive that a quick format wouldn't, though if error checking is a goal there are better tools for it, and the errors it would detect are ones that would be detected and reported as you write to the drive naturally. It makes it harder to recover the previous data on the drive, but not as well as specialized secure deletion tools. In any case, it's a time-consuming process of dubious necessity with few benefits. A fast internal drive may take several hours, though if it's a fast SSD connected over NVMe it may take substantially less.
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For example, a 4TB drive connected over USB 2.0 is likely to take over 25 hours for a full format. The speed of this can depend on the drive, and may take hours because it needs to, at least, write the full drive's capacity to the drive. The time to perform a quick format depends on the filesystem type, but typically takes a few seconds, and is almost always less than a minute.Ī full format does the same steps but also wipes the rest of the drive by settings its contents to zeroes. If there is data on the rest of the drive, it remains untouched, but unused and not visible to the user, until new files are written to that area. This involves writing small structures to certain specific locations on the drive, but it does not write to the rest of the drive at all. If the Security Options button is not available, Disk Utility cannot perform a secure erase on the storage device.Formatting is the process of setting up a filesystem on a partition.Ī quick format does the minimal number of steps to establish a new, empty filesystem on the partition. Secure erase options are available only for some types of storage devices. (Optional) If available, click Security Options, use the slider to choose how many times to write over the erased data, then click OK. If the Scheme pop-up menu isn’t available, make sure you selected the storage device you want to erase - it’s at the top of the hierarchy.Ĭlick the Format pop-up menu, then choose a file system format. Ĭlick the Scheme pop-up menu, then choose GUID Partition Map. In the sidebar, select the storage device you want to erase, then click the Erase button. If you want to erase any other type of storage device: Double-click Disk Utility in the /Applications/Utilities folder.
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Note: If you want to get your Mac ready to trade in, sell or give away, and your computer is a Mac with Apple silicon or an Intel-based Mac with an Apple T2 Security Chip, use Erase Assistant.