Back up your files before formatting a USB drive in GParted to avoid data loss. After installing GParted, make sure to select the correct drive using the drop-down menu in the top-right corner. If you ...

You can format an external hard drive in Ubuntu using the Gnome Partition Editor. It provides a graphical interface to simplify formatting and resizing hard drive partitions, even on external drives.

From there, we get a breakdown on how the data for each format is spread across the disk, right down to the physical location of the data.