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Level 1

8 points

Erased external hardrive, now showing 2.2TB used

I have a MacBook Pro running the latest version of macOS. I erased an external hard drive, formatting it as MS-DOS(FAT32). The reason for the is so that I can use the external hard drive to house some virtual machine hard disk that I dont want clogging up my computer’s Hard drive. After clicking erase it shows that the drive is empty but 2.2 TB of the 4 TB western digital hard drive is “used”.

1. Did I do something wrong?

2. Why did it take over half my drive after clicking erase?

3. Is there anyway to have more of the drive available, while still being able to read and write to it using the MacBook?

thanks in advance

Posted on Oct 24, 2018 5:36 PM

Best reply

kaz-k

Level 8

49,104 points

Posted on Oct 24, 2018 7:12 PM

FAT 32 format is capable 2TB volume limits, you'd better use exFAT instead.

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Erased external hardrive, now showing 2.2TB used

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