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Formatting SD cards on a Mac mini

I am curious if SD cards come formatted, or is there a method for formatting them on my Mac mini?

Posted on Aug 28, 2023 6:07 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 30, 2023 10:22 AM

Hey, you put me on the right track to further investigate. The external drive has a two option input , one is the lightning connection and the other an USB. The lightning connection is faulty but the USB connection offers the connection to be witnessed within the “ drive utility “. Thanks for help steering me into this trouble shooting path.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 30, 2023 10:22 AM in response to Justmet

Hey, you put me on the right track to further investigate. The external drive has a two option input , one is the lightning connection and the other an USB. The lightning connection is faulty but the USB connection offers the connection to be witnessed within the “ drive utility “. Thanks for help steering me into this trouble shooting path.

Aug 30, 2023 2:42 AM in response to Justmet

If you're going to use memory cards in a digital camera, it's best to format them in the camera. If you must format them in a computer, the SD Association recommends that you use their special formatting tool.


https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/


"It is strongly recommended to use the SD Memory Card Formatter to format SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards rather than using formatting tools provided with individual operating systems. In general, formatting tools provided with operating systems can format various storage media including SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards, but it may not be optimized for SD/SDHC/SDXC Cards and it may result in lower performance."


I believe that FAT32 is the standard filesystem for SDHC cards, and exFAT is the standard filesystem for SDXC ones. If you format a card using HFS+ (Mac), APFS (Mac), or NTFS (Windows), most devices like cameras, digital picture frames, TVs, MP3 players, etc., are not going to be very happy.

Formatting SD cards on a Mac mini

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