Each volume within an APFS container can have its own APFS format-APFS, APFS (Encrypted), APFS (Case-sensitive), or APFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted). You can easily add or delete volumes in APFS containers. Disk Utility provides various tasks such as formatting storage devices, mounting and unmounting volumes, creating disk images, and copying drives. In the sidebar, select the disk you want to format to use with Windows computers. If Disk Utility isn’t open, click the Launchpad icon in the Dock, type Disk Utility in the Search field, then click the Disk Utility icon. For example, folders named “Homework” and “HOMEWORK” are two different folders. In the Disk Utility app on your Mac, choose View > Show All Devices. For example, folders named “Homework” and “HOMEWORK” are two different folders.ĪPFS (Case-sensitive, Encrypted): Uses the APFS format, is case-sensitive to file and folder names, and encrypts the volume.
Choose this option if you don’t need an encrypted or case-sensitive format.ĪPFS (Encrypted): Uses the APFS format and encrypts the volume.ĪPFS (Case-sensitive): Uses the APFS format and is case-sensitive to file and folder names. Each volume uses only part of the overall container, so the available space is the total size of the container, minus the size of all the volumes in the container.Ĭhoose one of the following APFS formats for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later.ĪPFS: Uses the APFS format. Select the SSD and click Erase, give the Disk a name, Format: APFS, Scheme: GUID Partition Map, click Erase. You should now see your SSD Disk in the list above the Volumes Macintosh HD and Macintosh HD Data. If desired, you can specify reserve and quota sizes for each volume. Open Disk Utility, click View in the menubar, select Show All Devices. When a single APFS container has multiple volumes, the container’s free space is shared and is automatically allocated to any of the individual volumes as needed. macOS 10.13 or later supports APFS for both bootable and data volumes.ĪPFS allocates disk space within a container (partition) on demand. While APFS is optimized for the Flash/SSD storage used in recent Mac computers, it can also be used with older systems with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and external, direct-attached storage. Click Erase and now you can get to whatever you want for a format.Apple File System (APFS), the default file system for Mac computers using macOS 10.13 or later, features strong encryption, space sharing, snapshots, fast directory sizing, and improved file system fundamentals. Erase the physical drive as GUID partition and MacOS Extended. Within Disk Utility you may need to click 'View' and select 'Show All Devices' so that the physical drive appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. See also Create a disk image using Disk Utility on Mac. Repeat steps 35 for each remaining partition. Restore from a disk image: Click Image, choose the disk image you want to copy, then click Open. But trying to erase either the physical drive or the partitions causes it to freeze and. When erasing the SSD make sure to select the physical drive to erase which will usually be identified by the make & model of the drive. Do one of the following: Restore from a volume: Click the Restore from pop-up menu, then choose the volume you want to copy. Disk Utility sees the physical drive and the two partitions I had created. The drive had been formatted as Mac OS Extended, but I was told I should use APFS. So all you need to do is switch to Show All Devices. Im trying to use Disk Utility (v17) to format an external SSD. Now you can actually change it to whatever you want. Or probably what you want to do is select the Device and the result might be the same. But if you move up the chain you see that you can change the container to be something else. If you go into Erase it you can only erase it as an APFS. Now when you have have the Volume selected, the volume is APFS. Now with APFS you've got Device, Container, and then Volumes under that. So before we had, say, a physical device for the drive and then you had volumes. Now you can see that I'm actually selecting the Thumb Drive Volume inside of the one container for this actual physical device.
One where it shows only the volumes and another that Shows All Devices. You see in Mac OS Mojave disk utility has two view modes.
But, in fact, it's a completely different problem and a very simple one to solve. If I click Erase here you see that the only format options I get are APFS. But if you need to reformat it, say as the older Mac format or maybe a cross platform format with Windows, it seems like once you format something like this thumb drive at APFS you can't reformat it as anything else. How do you reformat a drive that is formatted APFS? APFS is the current way to format Mac drives. Video Transcript: Here's a question that's been asked a lot recently all over the internet.