Your SD (Secure Digital) card is probably the storage medium of choice for your digital camera, smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, computers, gaming consoles, and so forth. However, what are you supposed to do if the data is already filled to capacity? Should you delete files one by one? No, you should outright reformat the SD card.
But what if you have a Macintosh desktop or laptop computer? Can you format your SD card on a Mac? Yes, you can. Keep on reading to find out how.
What You Need
You will need the following:
- SD card
- Passive adapter
- External card reader
- Laptop or MacBook computer
- PC or desktop Macintosh computer
Steps Involved in Formatting Your SD Card Using a Mac
- Step 1: Access the SD card first by inserting it in the SD slot. If you’re using a Micro or Mini SD, then use a passive adapter to read them. You can also get an external card reader you can connect to your computer using a USB port if it lacks an SD slot. Remember that formatting your SD wipes the slate clean and removes all data.
- Step 2: Take note that early Macintosh versions like Mac OS 10.6.5 don’t support the exFAT format, which renders any 64GB SD card unreadable and unformattable on such an old operating system. You can only use MS-DOS (FAT) or FAT32 on such Mac PCs. You need a Macintosh PC or Mac notebook PC that supports exFAT and bigger capacity SD cards in order to format them.
- Step 3: You can upgrade your OS to 10.6.6 or later if it can take it or simply purchase the latest Apple products in order to access 64GB SD cards on an older Mac PC. At any rate, access the SD card as soon as its drive icon appears on your desktop. Ctrl-click it in order to get the dropdown menu that enables you to reformat it. Or you can go about picking and choosing which files to keep or not.
- Step 4: You can also open Disk Utility in order to access the same SD card drive. Click on the magnifying glass on the top-right corner of your Mac PC screen and type “Disk Utility” in the search box then open the program. On the left side of the program window, find the SD card drive. The SD card might have a name on it like UNTITLED or NO NAME unless you’ve specified a name for it. On the middle of the window, click the ERASE Tab.
- Step 5: Afterwards, click on the Format dropdown menu and select MS-DOS (FAT) if it’s a 32GB or smaller card. If it’s instead a 64GB and above card, select the ExFAT formatting. You will get a message asking you if you’re sure that you want to erase the partition of your SD card, followed by its designated name. Click erase to complete formatting. This will delete all the contents of the SD card, freeing up all its space.
Conclusion
It’s relatively easy to format your SD card using your Mac PC. You just need to be aware of how to use your Mac properly. Any method of accessing your SD card’s contents—from using card readers to putting in adapters as well as formatting it by the Disk Utility or by a Ctrl-click dropdown menu—is fair game since there are many ways to approach this task.