WD Drive - Western Digital drive :: Read only

Bob is dead on right. If you don't intend to use this drive with a Windows PC then reformat it to an Apple format such as APFS or HFS+ using the Disk Utility app on your Mac.

And FYI, there are third party drivers that allow Macs to read/write to NTFS drives IF these drives are going to switched between Macs and PCs on a regular basis. If this is not your use case then consider what BobThe Fisherman is telling you.

It didn’t work for you because you didn’t choose the device to erase. You chose the mounted volume on the MBR formatted drive. You have to show all devices from the view pop-up menu and select the actual device to erase. Then you must select a GUID partition map.

Sometimes Disk Utility just cannot modify certain drives because somehow the partition information is such that it causes problems with Disk Utility. I've usually encountered this after "burning" a boot image to a USB stick. Usually I will have to write zeroes to the beginning of the drive to destroy the partition table, then Disk Utility is able to erase it.

FYI, you may sometimes encounter issues mounting an exFAT drive on a Mac that has been formatted with Windows. This is due to Windows having the ability to use a lot of different file allocation sizes some of which macOS does not understand. The file allocation size used is determined by the size of the drive being formatted. Usually you will have better compatibility by using Disk Utility to erase a drive with exFAT. Just something to keep in mind if you encounter problems in the future using drives formatted as exFAT.

Glad you figured out a solution.

Why did you format the drive ExFat. Why not use Disk Utility and format it for your Mac?

Western Digital does not make it hard. Every drive you use on your Mac can and should be formatted by you for your Mac.

Good work 👍 and sorry for the long way around to fix it but you did 😄

May consider Not using Their Party Bundled Software to manage External Drives.

MacOS is very able to do all the heavy lifting without WS Software installed as it tends to be Buggy at Best

Further and for future usage to Format and External Drive from within macOS

refer to below image

The item that may have been missed is the View >> View ALL Devices in top of supplied Image above

Domdom911 wrote:

Because it could not. It came wit an error.

Then I suspect you were not properly using Disk Utility. Are you sure you were at the device level when you tried? I've never run across a WD drive that could not be formatted by Disk Utility.

Exactly how was the Drive connect to the Computer ?

Via a Hub ?

Directly from and to the computer ?

Any Adapter between WS Drive and Computer to convert USB-A to USB-C ?