Emily Long is a freelance writer based in Salt Lake City. After graduating from Duke University, she spent several years reporting on the federal workforce for Government Executive, a publication of ...

Not all drives speak the same language, and these file systems decide who understands what.

How do I format a hard drive? A computer hard drive stores your files, allowing you to access them at any time. The majority of the time, you want these files to remain stored properly and safely.

Before we begin, it’s important to know that formatting a drive will erase everything on it, so you’ll want to make sure that you back up or save anything that you don’t want to lose. After you’ve ...

If you’re installing a new hard drive, or need to wipe your drive clean for that “fresh” feeling, you’ll end up formatting your drive. Formatting will check the drive for errors, and prepare it for ...

USB flash drives (a.k.a. “thumb” drives) may seem passé in a world where AirDrop and cloud storage solve the file-transfer problem. But they’re still quite useful for handing over files to another ...

This how-to shows you the steps using Disk Utility 13 in OS X 10.10 Yosemite, but the process is the same if you’re using OS X 10.9 Mavericks or 10.8 Mountain Lion. Here are the instructions using OS ...

Formatting your hard drive is very useful. It’s good for clearing everything off a secondary drive or when installing a new copy of Windows. Formatting is also good for cleaning up storage issues, ...