Formats can mean a lot of different things, in a lot of different industries.

Even within the realms of computers, it can have a whole bunch of different meanings depending on what its pertaining to.

So before we get into it, I want to address this post is about hard drive formats, including USB, external, Sold State Drives and thumb drives.

When we are talking about formatting our hard drive, we are not just talking about wiping them. Yes, a format will wipe a hard drive, but that is not it’s purpose.

The reason we format a hard drive, or the reason a drive must be formatted it to set ip up to be used.

We format our disks so they basically have a set of rules and instructions, ways to read and write data.

Many different systems require different kinds of formats and thats why there are so many out there. An example if PC’s use NTFS and Apple Macs use HFS+ Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

So with so many formats out there, what are the main ones, when should you use them and how are they different?

NTFS – Windows NT File System

This is the one most people have heard of so it makes sense to start here.

Although other Operating Systems support this format, some can at least read, Microsoft Windows is the primary operating system which uses this format.

Apple tried to introduce it into their operating systems which a lot are able to read, but gave because it was too problematic.

Many external hard drives or USB thumb drives you buy from the store come pre-formatted with NTFS ready to use and most of the market use Microsoft Windows operating systems.

FAT, FAT 16 or FAT 32

This is going back now but a lot of people might still be familiar with it.

This format has been around since the 1970’s and can still be found on older computers now with older Microsoft Operating Systems also. Hence why the later Windows such as 7, 8 and 10, even though they use NTFS are still able to read and write to FAT formatted drives.

FAT filing systems were superseded by NTFS due to its inability to basically bundle data close together on the hard drives, making them much more fragmented and data scattered all over the place. This makes drives much slower.

HFS+ Mac

HFS+ are Apple Mac and Macbooks primary hard drive format and have been for some years.

Before Apple used just plain old HFS but are always updating their technology.

The big draw back however is HFS+ because a little unstable on drives over 2TBs which might be why we see smaller hard drives in Macs and Macs being able to use another format such as exFAT.

exFAT

ExFAT was also invented by Microsoft to be used on smaller flash drives.

From this it can now be found is all sorts of electronic devices and can store files greater than 4GB, which was a draw back to the original FAT.

Most of the time you can put a exFAT drive in a Windows computer and add files to it, take it out and put it ina Linux or Apple Mac computer and read and write to the same data which is very handy for people who own multiple, different kind of systems.

ext (2,3 and 4)

This format is for the Linux operating system which a lot of people probably don’t know they are using even though not directly.

Although there are many good Linux disros for desktop computers, many servers including the one hosting this web pages you are reading right now use Linux Servers.

This format has only been around since the early (0’s when Linux arose and its pretty much used for Linux operating system and devices exclusively.