I do a lot of cross-platform video file transfer and was wondering if I can use any Mac-based tools to format a drive or even USB flash drive in FAT or FAT32 format?
Mac systems have always been able to work just fine with the Windows-based FAT file system, but not vice-versa: Apple File Systems (AFS) is not Windows compatible. FAT, by the way, stands for “file allocation table”, it has nothing to do with weight or size! Fortunately, your Mac system is quite capable of formatting a disk drive or flash drive in FAT format as desired.
A point of clarification before we go further, however: FAT and FAT32 are the same thing at this point in the evolution of hard disks and drive formats. Back in the day, FAT was an 8-bit format and dramatically limited the maximum size of files. FAT16 helped, but FAT32 is the only format in widespread use at this point. Why? Because by using 32 bit addressing, FAT32 can have partitions up to 2TB, significantly more than the 4GB limit of FAT16. FAT32 also supports a 4GB limit to the size of individual files, plenty of space for just about all video files too.
Anyway, the program you want to use on your Mac is called Disk Utility and it’s found in the “Utilities” folder within your Applications folder. Launch it with the drive you want to reformat as FAT plugged in, and you’ll see something like this:
As you can see, I’ve already chosen the external USB flash drive “Kingston DataTraveler 3.0”. On the right you can see the overall usable space on the device as 30.98GB. It’s a 32GB, but there’s 1GB taken up by the file system itself, a pretty typical size. On the left column make double sure that you have chosen the removable drive or disk that you want to reformat – you don’t want to erase your system drive by accident! – then click on “Erase” along the top. A window will pop up:
Notice that the default file system format for a drive or disk on MacOS X is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. That’s not what you want, however, so click on the menu to choose from the various options:
Again, it says “FAT” but it’s FAT32, no worries! Once you choose FAT there are no Schemes to choose from, so just give the drive a name as desired and click “Erase” when you’re ready. It’s pretty quick on all but the largest file systems and soon enough you’ll see a status window informing you of progress:
Done! Now the drive reappears in Disk Utility (and on your Mac desktop) with its new name and format:
And that’s all there is to it. Easy enough once you know which tool to launch!