How do I format a Samsung t7 external hard drive for Mac?

[des99]

On 12/9/2022 at 5:36 PM, fisherking said:

all my external drives are spinning disks, and all are formatted APFS (just mentioning).

Yep, mine are a mixture - the older spinning rust externals are all HFS+, but the most recent one I ummed and ahhed about it (18TB drive) but went with APFS in the end as hopefully a more robust filesystem for that much data.

[Ava G]

This is absolutely unf....ing believable!! First of all, thank you all for explaining this so very well.

I stumbled on this post looking for help with the same issue, or perhaps a similar one. I bought this T7 not realising that it entails using the touch software. I bought it because it's a SSD and I needed the 2TB. All well. Now, I couldn't care less about this touch protection. I don't need any passwords or anything like that. To my surprise, in order to open the disk on any computer, one must install that software first. I thought, no big deal, I'll reformat it and it's gone. Well...not so much. After doing the reformat numerous times, following the above instructions, etc, all worked out as described. The only problem - this g.d d.mn software is still on and that's that! How do I remove it?? Is that possible at all? Or I can go straight back to the store and return it. Thank you so much in advance. Oh, btw this is all on Mac. Perhaps there's a way to completely wipe this out on a PC? 

extremely frustrated.

[des99]

I have no experience with the touch ones, but as I understand it, the whole point of the touch feature is to encrypt the drives, which can only be unlocked by you.

The software that does this is embedded into the drive, you can't remove it. Perhaps you just should have bought the regular version, if you didn't want the encryption feature?

[Chele Diamond]

Just want to say THANK YOU for this! Exactly what I needed as I felt I was flying blind and going down rabbit holes to understand formatting etc. With sincerest gratitude!