Without a doubt we can say that to clean a pendrive of everything that is inside it is not enough to delete the information and that's it. We have to take into account that there can always be something inside the pendrive or that it really does not stay clean at all, so the best and simplest thing is format it directly from our Mac.
It may sound complicated or it may even be that many of the steps may seem more complicated than they really are, therefore Today we will see the whole process step by step that has to be done to format a pendrive with a Mac.
No matter the type of pendrive that we want to format, everyone can go through this file cleaning process in the same way, even if it is advertising or one bought in store. The truth is that many users do not know that they can clean or erase all the content of an advertising pendrive and use it for their own files once they have "peeked" inside it. It is common among users furthest from the technological world not to know that pendrives are really like an external hard drive forto store content of any kind, from documents to mp3 music or even photos.
But today we are not going to talk about the function that these pendrives can carry out, what we are going to see is how we can format them directly from a Mac. The steps are simple and you just have to take into account the function that we want the pendrive to perform later to define the format that we are going to give in the erasure.
Connect the pendrive and save a copy if necessary on the Mac
The first of the steps as always is to save a copy if necessary of the contents of the pendrive. This will be directly linked to the user's need and it will be something important if we want to save the content of that pendrive on our Mac and then use the pendrive in other areas. The good thing about this is that it is very easy to save the content that we have on the pendrive since simply by connecting it to the Mac and it detects it, we can drag to any folder or place all its content it contains.
For this we can select everything manually or by pressing cmd + A and we drag everything to the place we want. Now we have the pendrive clean of files and all of them saved in case we need them. Obviously those who do not want to save this content simply skip the step.
Disk Utility on macOS
At this point with the pendrive connected to our Mac, the steps to follow are really simple and anyone can carry out the task of erasing or formatting a pendrive on the Mac. We started talking about the Disk Utility tool, which we can find on the Launchpad in the "Others" folder. In this case it is the tool with which we are going to be able to format our pendrive or any disk, whether internal or external, and therefore it is important to know where to find it.
Disk Utility can be quietly located in our Dock, this allows us to have the tool at hand for any occasion that we need to use it. Once we open Disk Utility we will see all the disks and USB connected, we will look for the one we have to format and we will start the process in a simple and fast way. That is why having the tool available in the dock makes it easier for us to format any disk on our Mac. To anchor it in the dock we simply press the right button from the icon of the dock> Options> keep in dock.
Erase or format the pendrive
When do we have everything ready to start with the task? Well, really, at any moment we can start with the erasure of the disk but we should not rush into it since when formatting a disk, pendrive or similar it leaves us without its content forever and therefore it is important to take it easy. This process is easy to carry out but rushing is not good in any of the cases and therefore we have to have enough time to carry out this delete action, nothing else.
Now what we have to do from the Disk Utility option is locate our pendrive to remove it and get started with the process. Open the Disk Utility tool, with the pendrive connected and located the pendrive in the Disk Utility tool, we have to follow the same steps as in the cases of erasing a normal disk. So we chose the album and continued.
As you can see in the upper screenshot, the pendrive appears as Flash USB Disk Media, in my case. In your case, it will appear with another name and it is key that we look at the point that says "Location" since we will see that it says External and tells us that it is not a Mac disk. Now we simply have to click on the option that we have in the tabs that appear at the top and that indicate Delete:
Once we click on delete, a new dialog window appears in which it shows us: the name, the format and the schema. These are important points when we want to use the pnedrive to create a bootable USB that will help us install an operating system, but in the case that we only want space for files, documents, photos or similar, we do not have to worry too much. We put a name to the pendrive, we use the format that we consider appropriate and we continue.
In the name it is evident that we will put the one we want, but in the format section we have several options available and to use the pendrive on the Mac it is best to use Mac OS Plus (with registration)If we want to use the pendrive on our Mac but also be able to write and add content on a Windows PC, we have to choose the ExFat format and for those who only want to use the disk on a PC, it is best to use MS-DOS (FAT ), format with which we can use the pendrive on any PC. The good thing about being able to choose the format at this time is that it makes the task much easier and my recommendation is that you use the one that suits you best.
At Apple they tell us that MS-DOS (FAT) is best for disks that are 32GB or less in size and exFAT for which the disk size is greater than 32 GB. In any case once the format has been selected only we have to accept by clicking on «Delete». Now we have to wait for the process to finish and we will have our pendrive totally clean with the format we want. This process can be repeated as many times as you want on a Mac, so try and use the one that suits you best that you can always format the USB with your Mac.