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I purchased a SanDisk 128GB USB-C thumb drive. I plugged the drive into my Mac (running macOS Sonoma 14.1.2), then used Disk Utility to format it as APFS. So far, so good.
I now wish to reformat the drive as exFAT. But when I open Disk Utility, only four formatting options appear, all APFS variants (see attached image). Is it no longer possible to format external drives as exFAT in macOS Sonoma?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 14.1
PommePourMoi wrote:
I purchased a SanDisk 128GB USB-C thumb drive. I plugged the drive into my Mac (running macOS Sonoma 14.1.2), then used Disk Utility to format it as APFS. So far, so good.
I now wish to reformat the drive as exFAT. But when I open Disk Utility, only four formatting options appear, all APFS variants (see attached image). Is it no longer possible to format external drives as exFAT in macOS Sonoma?
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/092bc5d9-a2af-4328-b720-36a89906c1ef
External: top most physical USB. Not the Container level, not the Volume level
partition map GUID
PommePourMoi wrote:
I purchased a SanDisk 128GB USB-C thumb drive. I plugged the drive into my Mac (running macOS Sonoma 14.1.2), then used Disk Utility to format it as APFS. So far, so good.
I now wish to reformat the drive as exFAT. But when I open Disk Utility, only four formatting options appear, all APFS variants (see attached image). Is it no longer possible to format external drives as exFAT in macOS Sonoma?
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/092bc5d9-a2af-4328-b720-36a89906c1ef
External: top most physical USB. Not the Container level, not the Volume level
partition map GUID
PommePourMoi wrote:
Thanks, but I do not see the downward-pointing arrow to expand all levels. I only see what I assume is the top level.
https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/0e9ddd9b-fba1-4a6f-989f-05cf0f1ba2d6
DiskUtility>View>Show ALL Devices
So I bought one of the exact same thumb drives, only to discover that it does NOT like any of the native OSX Disc formats. As soon as I got one home, I re-formatted it as APFS, only to discover that the read and write speeds were extremely slow. I got in touch with Western Digital, filed a complaint, and they sent me a new one. When the new one came in, the first thing I did was run a speed test on the disc with Black Magic Disk Speed Test. Write speed was about 197MB/s, and read speeds was about 344MB/s, both very acceptable. Next I reformatted this brand new thumb drive as APFS, and re-ran the speed test. Both read and write speeds slowed down to a crawl.... down to the single digits. Completely unacceptable that the drive isn't format agnostic. So you might want to check to see if your drive is reading and writing at levels good enough to make it actually useful with the native Mac formats... Converting it back to Master Boot Record and ExFAT restored both the read and write speeds, which is good, but still makes this thumb drive less useful than I'd like. Hope you have a better experience than I did.
Thanks, but I do not see the downward-pointing arrow to expand all levels. I only see what I assume is the top level.
PommePourMoi wrote:
That solved it. Thank you!
Good computing PommePourMoi —
thanks for using the new Apple Support Communities
That solved it. Thank you!
Option to format USB drive as exFAT not appearing in Disk Utility
