Which File System Should You Use? Before you format your USB drive, you need to think about which file system to use. File Systems are simply ways of organising data on a storage device (such as hard drives or SD Cards), and support for various file systems varies depending on your operating system. Windows 10 offers three file system options when formatting a USB drive: FAT32, NTFS and exFAT. Here is the breakdown of the pros and cons of each filesystem. Pros Cons Best Used For Fat 32.
How to Format a USB Pen Drive on a Mac by Christopher Capelle. Such as attaching a hard drive to the computer or burning the files onto a CD. While flash drives are universal, some Mac computers are unable to read flash drives that have been formatted in a particular way, so learning how to properly format your pen drive is paramount.
Compatible with all major operating systems. Less memory usage. Cannot handle single files larger 4GB.Limited partition size (up to 32GB). Removable storage devices such as USB Flash Drives.
Devices that need to be plugged into a variety of operating systems. NTFS. Can create partitions larger than 32GB. Can read/write files larger than 4GB. Supports on-the-fly file encryption.
Limited cross-platform compatibility. Internal hard drives.
Windows system drives. ExFAT. Provides an unlimited file and partition size. You may need to install drivers to get exFAT compatibility on Linux. External hard drives.
Flash drives if you want to work with files larger than 4GB. Now, let’s take a look at some ways you can format your USB drive on Windows 10. Method 1: Format USB Drive using File Explorer This is the easiest way and simply requires you to plug in your USB Drive, open the Windows File Explorer and right click your drive to view a number of actions that you can perform. Clicking the “format” option will open a new window where you can configure the available options before formating your drive. I will be going with the NTFS file system because I need cross-platform compatibility (Windows and Linux), and I may need to transfer files larger than 4GB on occasion.
As for allocation size, it all depends on what you want to do with your drive. If you have a large drive (such as a 500GB hard drive), a large allocation size such as 32 kilobytes will make your device faster, but storage space may fill up quicker. For small drives, such as 4GB or 8GB flash drives, a smaller allocation size will help conserve space.
I’m going with 4kb (4096 bytes) as my allocation size because I work with small files most of the time, and my flash drive is just 16GB. The volume label is simply the name of your USB Drive. You can name your drive anything you want. Once you have selected the options, you can click the format button to begin the formatting process. Ticking the “Quick Format” checkbox means that your drive will not be scanned for bad sectors. If you have a malfunctioning drive, you might want to uncheck that box for a more thorough scanning.
A success message will be displayed on the screen once the formatting is completed. Method 2: Format USB Drive Using Command Prompt Another method of formatting your USB drive is by using Diskpart, a command prompt utility. All commands given below should be entered without quotes. A full screenshot of the steps is shown below.
Search for the command prompt on the Start Menu or just type cmd. Right-click the command prompt icon and select “Run as Administrator.” 2. Once the command prompt opens up, type in the following command. You forgot to mention that an USB drive is built with the same hardware as Solid State Disks (SSD). Every write action to an USB drive will shorten its live as all drives build on SSD technology. So this goes for the SSD drives themselves, the memory cards like the SD Card in your camera and phone and the USB drive. quote Even if your drive is healthy, you may still want to format it to get rid of the contents there.Quote No you don’t want to format the drive!
Just don’t put sensitive data on a stick If there is nothing wrong with the stick don’t format it as a format touches EVERY bit on a drive it will shorten its live time more than normal write actions. quoteTicking the “Quick Format” checkbox means that your drive will not be scanned for bad sectors. quote Completely wrong.
I don’t know where you get your information from but when checking this checkbox the format tool will only overwrite the File Allocation Table. Where this is and how it is done depends on the format chosen. Checking this box does NOT overwrite the whole disk and data can (with special tools) be retrieved still! Remove the checkbox to do a full format where every sector is overwritten. Even now it is possible with those special tools to retrieve data. If you want to be sure all data is destroyed you must overwrite each sector with the Hexadecimal value FF at least 2 times.
Concerning Method 2: For most people DON’T DO IT! The risk is to big you pick the wrong drive and desctroy you main installation and have nothing but an empty PC left. The method does not give more than the first method. If you can’t fix the USB drive with method 1 take a hammer and destroy it. They are to cheap to bother hours of work on. First method come out with a pop up saying Windows(10) can’t format the flash drive.
Method 2 while trying to Create Partition Primary a warning text says it can’t. The text reads:”No usable free extend could be found. It may be that there is insufficient free space to create a partition at the specified size and offset. Specify different size and offset values or don’t specify either to create the maximum sized partition.
It may be that the disk is partitioned using MBR disk. Partitioning format and the disk contains either 4 primary partitions, (no more partitions may be created), or 3 primary partitions, (no more partitions may be created), or 3 primary partitions and one extended partition, (only logical drives may be created).” The 16 G flash drive is used as memory for the cell phone. I used my Flash Drive to run MemTest for RAM thinking i had a faulty RAM. Turns out i had insufficient RAM. Left my 16GB Flash Drive with 48MB space after deleting MemTest.
Tried option one first and did not fix the problem.(It would not let me select a bigger capacity). Then did option 2 and it fixed the problem and i now have14.4GB of usable drive space. It took ten minuets to perform both options to be up and running almost straight away.
Instruction clear as day and easy to follow. Put the hammer away. Comments are closed.
I'm working on a MacBook Air with a really peculiar problem. When using it to copy video files larger than 2GB to a USB drive, it fails with the error: The item can't be copied because it is too large for the volume's format I tested by transferring around 10 video files of varying sizes to a 128GB flash drive.
Those that were under 2GB succeeded and those over it failed. To rule out the USB being faulty, I also did the same on another 8GB flash drive, which had the same problem. Both flash drives show up in MacOS as MS-DOS (FAT32). In addition, this issue only seems to apply to MacOS, as transferring the same files to the same USB sticks from my Windows 7 machine largely succeeded, with the only transfer limitation being FAT32's usual 4GB file limit. Does anyone have an idea what's going on here? Thanks to for finding conclusive evidence that this is a bug in MacOS High Sierra - namely, created within the past few days, which has a few users attesting to it. For additional context, I thought I'd add the results of my research since asking this question.
This particular bug is the latest in a long list of bugs introduced by High Sierra, and is apparently so minor/rare relative to others that it hasn't registered on any of non-comprehensive of them. It has, however, been reported in that last MacRumors thread by myself and at least one another user, so it will hopefully be added to that list soon. Until Apple eventually releases the update that fixes it, there are two workarounds for this bug. Convert your flash or external drive to exFAT You can convert the FAT32 flash drive or external drive that you're having trouble with to exFAT, which is a newer, more superior filesystem with file limits that are so large they can (currently) be considered non-existent. The only real downside to this solution is that exFAT's relative newness compared to FAT32 will make it incompatible with certain less popular hardware, although it was still released in 2006, so this is increasingly inapplicable. I'd recommend trying to convert to exFAT first and see if the hardware you need to use your flash drive or external disk on supports it.
If it does, you're good to go, and if not, you can simply convert back to FAT32. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to convert to exFAT non-destructively (i.e. Without data loss), so you'll need to backup all the data on your drive before formatting the drive in the usual way via Disk Utility, and then transfer your data back once the format is complete. Use another file manager This bug doesn't seem so much to be a problem of the APFS filesystem that High Sierra introduced - its replacement to HFS+ - but of Finder itself. For that reason, as pointed out in his answer, the bug can also be worked around for now by simply using an alternative file manager like or 1 until Apple decides to release the fix. 1 Speaking of Commander One, a tangentially related side-note: if, as of the time of posting this answer, you currently have 's Elmedia Player or Folx installed on your Mac, you should as soon as possible.