If you tried use MacOS’s disk utility to erase or format a old/new hard drive, you may encounter some issue. MacOS will show below error when you tried to erase or format the drive, regardless your hard drive space:
Erase process has failed, press done to continue
The detail message will say:
Volume erase failed: Media kit reports not enough space on this device for requested operation
This error appear mostly when you try to convert Windows formatted hard drive to HFS+ (OSX Journaled). Some new external hard drive come with NTFS format. If you have this issue, you can still use diskutil to do this, but in terminal. Step 1, find your disk name you’re trying to format. You can use command:
1 | diskutil list |
or find that from disk utility. 
Step 2, unmount that usb from terminal. From step 1 we got the disk name is disk3. Replace disk3 with the correct disk name you found using step 1 for below command.
1 | diskutil unmountDisk force disk3 |
Step 3, Filling the disk with all zeros (This may take a while, as it is making every bit of data 0.
1 | sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk3 bs=1M |
Step 4, partition it The following command will create one partition with JHFS+ format. You can change JHFS+ to APFS, ExFAT if you like.
1 | diskutil partitionDisk disk3 GPT JHFS+ "My External HD" 0g |
If you have issue with Windows, you can see the tutorial for Windows: Properly Delete Extra Partitions on USB Drive using DiskPart
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