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Hey gang......
I have been consistently having trouble formatting USB hard drives. I'm running High Sierra and using Disk Utility>>Erase>>Mac OS Extended (Journaled)>>no exotic characters in the disk name.

The operation fails the first time, leaving me with a greyed-out drive with a random hex name in Disk Utility, but not visible on the desktop. When I repeat the same operation for the greyed-out disk, it works fine.

What am I doing wrong?

Disk Utility works differently in High Sierra. It defaults to APFS.

Are you formatting an HDD or SSD?

Are you booting from APFS or HFS+, SSD or HDD?

Hi Mike.....
I knew you’d have some thoughts on this.

mikehalloran wrote:Disk Utility works differently in High Sierra. It defaults to APFS.

I didn’t know what this is until I just Googled it. Not sure I understand the ramifications, unless—by optimizing the OS for SDDs, it no longer works as well on HDDs. (?)

mikehalloran wrote:Are you formatting an HDD or SSD?

HDDs only

mikehalloran wrote:Are you booting from APFS or HFS+, SSD or HDD?

My system drive is Apple flash memory. (Does that answer your question?)

BTW: This is happening on both my late-2013 Mac Pro and my 2016 MacBook Pro (both on HS).


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Yes, it did answer the questions — thanks.

Here's the long form from Apple Support. Read the whole thing to get a better idea.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

Format the Drive, not the volumes. Choose GUID Partition Map.

You can format HDDs as APFS in Mojave but not HDDs — which is good. As for SSDs, normally
APFS unless being used for Time machine which should be Mac OS Extended.

Never reformat a boot drive on a newer Mac running HS or Mojave to Mac OS Extended. Likewise do not partition it and run a second OS. You can spend hours trying to undo that after totally screwing up your system. I did that on an external test drive just to see ... yikes!

mikehalloran wrote:Here's the long form from Apple Support. Read the whole thing to get a better idea. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208496

Good article—thanks, Mike!

mikehalloran wrote:Format the Drive, not the volumes. Choose GUID Partition Map.

Good tip… I always wondered about this.

I'm still a little fuzzy on whether I should format disks I'm creating for project backups (not system disks, not Time Machine) as APFS or Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Thoughts?

Thanks again.