I still find it impossible to guess what Disk Utility will do when asked to convert an SSD or USB stick to APFS, though. Problems with APFS are more understandable: it is, after all, a brand new file system, and is bound to have teething problems. Unlike with APFS, there shouldn’t be any need for new code to make Disk Utility work reliably with established formats such as ExFAT and HFS+.
The puzzle here is that ExFAT format and USB sticks are hardly novel. After the second release of a major version of macOS, that is hardly acceptable. I have taken to formatting all such sticks in Sierra, even though this means erasing them twice to work through its initial failure currently that seems to be the only way to do so reliably.
It tries to format them in ExFAT, but usually seems to make a mess and produce an unusable volume. Its behaviour with USB sticks is particularly irksome.
It tends to refuse some apparently straightforward tasks, like formatting some USB sticks and SSDs in APFS, but for others it blunders ahead and gets them wrong. So it seems good to use, once you have worked through its annoying habit of first refusal.ĭisk Utility 17.0, even build 337 which came with the High Sierra 10.13.1 update, is almost the exact opposite. I can use ExFAT and HFS+ drives formatted by Disk Utility 16.3 with Sierra 10.12.6, and High Sierra 10.13 and 10.13.1. In my experience, when it formats a drive, it is pretty reliable. Try again, and it suddenly discovers that it can do it after all, and completes without any error. But not infrequently, the first attempt fails. Sometimes, it will format a USB memory ‘stick’ in standard ExFAT without batting an eyelid. Although it can usually be coaxed to do most of its tasks properly, it often throws errors and refuses many basic tasks the first time around. I’ll start with version 16.3, supplied with macOS Sierra 10.12.6.
While we’re all thinking about Apple’s software quality assurance, following its recent root user vulnerability, I’d like a few words about Disk Utility.