USB Flash Drives Will Not Support GUID Scheme or Partitioning Under Mac OS Extended (Journaled) Format

I've successfully formatted SanDisk external drives (not thumb drives), so it appears to be an inconsistent situation. I've already conveyed SanDisk's official position. It may come down to whichever driver chip (and its firmware) gets "placed" in the drive along with the memory chip(s) during manufacture. SanDisk and other manufacturers may be just exercising their freedom to employ whatever driver chips might be available/most cost-effective for each batch of drives. All of these drivers and firmware probably support exFat/MBR, so that may be why SanDisk (and others) claim they don't support reformatting to HFS+. It doesn't matter to 99.99% of their Mac users, given that most simply use these drives to store data files.

Does anyone know for certain what USB Flash Drive brands and models support Mac OS Extended formatting and the GUID Partition Table scheme? Having spent a couple of hours at my local Apple Store yesterday, I discovered than none of the USB drives that are sold in-store will support such (verified via the drive manufacturer's technical support and conveyed directly to the Apple Store manager).

It appears that BDAqua is correct. Firmware issues might be at the root. Some drives will work, others not, even from the same manufacturer.

SanDisk explicitly does not support HFS+ formatting on any of their flash drives, according to an official response conveyed to me and to Apple.

Attempts on several drives (Micro Center, Kingston, Emtec) cause Disk Warrior to report erase failure and will not remount. In each case I can force Disk Utility to recognize the unmounted drive and erase again, but it will only do so via macOS Extended and Apple Partition Map; can't reformat to exFAT. I can write data files and read such, but certainly not force creation of a bootable drive for a macOS installer.

Also tried DiskMaker X (which somebody on another discussions thread suggested). That too failed.

Another person suggested trying to partition (instead of erasing) the drive to try to force the GUID partitioning (or revert to exFat/MBR formatting. Haven't been able to get that to work either.

Further, am trying all this on multiple Macs with operating systems ranging from Sierra to Monterey.

Does anybody know a USB flash drive manufacturer that expressly supports reformatting their drives to HFS+?

That is just not true. There are a variety of memory chip manufacturers and driver chip/firmware manufacturers from which drive assemblers choose for their drives. Those choices drive cost and reliability.

Maybe you recall from the old days when external drives for Windows simply would not work on Macs. Mac users had to find drives that would support both platforms. I don't recall any (other than Apple back in the 1980s) that made external drives that would work only on Macs.

Please stop. It is not nonsense. It is completely understandable from a business standpoint. Further, as I related previously, SanDisk's statements were official, and conveyed directly to Apple, copied to me.

As you have experienced, some of SanDisk's products work fine with HFS+ formatting. It's just that SanDisk does not officially support such. They even went so far as to state that SanDisk does not test any of their flash drives under HFS+ formatting; exFat and Master Boot only. That means they relinquish choice of driver and memory chips to their contract manufacturer(s). Their requirements instead likely focus on read/write speeds, delivered cost, and perhaps reliability to some extent.

I successfully made contact with Apple Corporate Relations 5/6/22 regarding this matter, especially as regards why Apple stores sell USB flash drives where the manufacturer of which claims it does not support HFS+ formatting, only ExFat. The person I spoke with will commence an investigation and let me know what transpires. Management of the Apple Store I frequent is also onboard.

I'll post again when I know more.