File System Setup
File systems are standards for organizing, maintaining, and accessing data on a disk drive.
See also this document for creating a partition table, and this document for using a new file system.
Creating File systems
Henceforward you will see reference to sdXN, where you should understand that X needs to be replaced with the relevant letter and N with the relevant number. You should also understand how to find that relevant letter and number combination, and the risks of finding the incorrect letter or number.
ext2
Don't.
ext3
Don't.
ext4
If you are creating ext4 file systems, you probably are using Linux. Therefore, let's assume you have the Linux toolset available.
Running as superuser:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdXN
Consider disabling access time on secondary and storage drives. Setting this metadata isn't always helpful and carries a speed cost.
# <device> <dir> <type> <options> <dump> <fsck> /dev/sdXN /var ext4 defaults,noatime 0 0
FAT32
The main advantage to FAT32 is it near-universal mount-ability. (Expect issues on a vanilla macOS environment!) The cost of getting that is steep though. Expect much slower performance, greater instability, and incompatibility with standard Linux file metadata.
On Linux, run as superuser:
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdXN
MS-DOS
On Linux you can run as superuser:
mkdosfs /dev/sdXN
But you should also know that mkdosfs is a symlink to mkfs.vfat.