(SOLVED) Formatting My Book 4TB for Mac: is it hanging or just slow?

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

I bought my My Book 4TB today. It’s formatted for PC out of the box. So, to use it with my iMac I used the WD Drive Utility to format it for Mac.

It has been busy for 2 hours now. There was no option to choose between quick format or secure erase. So I don’t know which of the 2 is being executed (I guess it’s not the quick one).

My question is, how can I tell it’s formatting and not just hanging there?
• The My Book is blinking slowly, indicating the ‘standby-mode’
• The progression bar in ‘WD Drive Utility’ is at 50% for a couple of hours now. No movement.

I know formatting 4TB can be slow. Should I be patient or try again with Apple’s Disk Utility?

2

Hi, check in finder and see if you are able to see the drive, if you are then you are good to go, if not then I would use disk utility and format it that way.

3

Thanks for your reply.

After 10 hours of waiting and still no progress I decided to quit the process.

I had to force-quit WD Drive Utility because it didn’t respond. After reconnecting the disk it didn’t show in the finder.
But fortunately it was visible in Apple Disk Utility. I formatted the drive from there and that took just a few seconds.

It works perfectly now. :slight_smile: