How to Format an OS X Terminal Hard Disk. Mac OS X Mountain Lion gives users several ways to access the Terminal and three common options for formatting a hard drive.

While most modern hard drives make use of the NTFS file system ... format an external drive on Mac with just a few clicks. You can find the "Erase" option by either locating the USB drive in Finder ...

While the Mac can use a hard drive formatted for Windows, some features may be limited. So it's a good idea to format a new hard drive specifically for macOS.

In Knowledge Base article #107285, Apple notes that Mac OS 9 disk drivers are required after reformatting a disk.

Formatting a drive in macOS is easy, and is all done via Disk Utility. Handily, both Windows and macOS play nice with exFAT, with each reading from and writing to partitions using the file system.