IMTI

(I Make Things Interesting) Architecting, Developing, nixCraft, DevOps, AI/ML, Blockchain

Formatting Drives on MacOS

A stack of old drives, a terminal and diskutil.

I have had this collection of old external drives hanging around for years. There was a time I was having terrible luck with hard drives. It turned out I managed to amass a collection of about eight drives from one terabyte to four terabytes. Fortunately, I keep copies of nearly all my files on cloud drives, split between Amazon, Google and DropBox. I had a sneaking suspicion that the discs themselves were ok and somehow my Mac was communicating with the RAID controllers in a way that caused them to fail.

Burn SD Images on MacOs

Use the command line to burn SD cards, easy and fast.

Use your terminal to burn images fast and easy with dd. I do a lot of professional and hobby development for projects using devices such as Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, Libre Computer, Tinker Board, etc. I run across a lot of tutorials with people downloading and using big GUI apps with clunky drag and drop interfaces to burn images. It’s one command in your terminal. Technically, it’s three, but I don’t count listing and unmounting as the final act of burning.