Press Y or N to continue or stop the formatting respectively. Typing the following will bring up the formatting prompts Step 3: Your USB drive will have an assigned letter, for example “F”. To do this, open your “Start” menu and type “cmd” into the search box.

As with our previous steps, backing up to save your data is still necessary. Step 1: Plug the drive in and make sure it has been detected. Some may find this method to be easier or more intuitive but it’s simply typing out the commands instead of using the tools in your Explorer. Our backups are created and our format type is set so click “Start” to initialize the process.Īn alternative method is formatting USB drives using the Command Prompt. In this case, we’ll be formatting to exFAT.

Step 3: On the “File System” dropdown, select the desired format. This opens a dialog box with formatting options. Once it has been recognized, open up your standard File Explorer. Step 1: Plug the USB drive into your computer and allow it to be detected. Reformatting will result in a wipe of the drive so backing up on another device is vital to keeping your data. Additionally, NTFS has read-only compatibility with Mac devices, a flaw not shared by the exFAT format.īefore we get started make sure to back up all data.

If one of these writes is taking place and a drive is pulled out, corruption and a reformat is required to get things back in order but your data will have been lost. It makes many extra disk writes and, as a dynamic file system, can also write without your knowledge. NTFS however, is not a flash drive’s best friend. It makes very few unnecessary writes, and stores files throughout the drive in order to maximize the lifespan and speed up transfers. exFAT has very large file size and partition size limits so files larger than 4GB a piece can be stored on a flash drive formatted with exFAT. Introduced in 2006, it’s designed to be a lightweight file system like FAT32 without the extra features of NTFS and without the FAT32 limitations. In this guide, we’ll go over the simple steps to formatting a USB drive and which format is best for certain situations.ĮxFAT is a file system optimized specifically for flash drives. Whether you’re formatting an internal drive, external drive, or USB flash drive, Windows makes it possible to choose between NTFS and exFAT formats. How To: Correctly Format a USB Flash Drive in exFAT

How to format usb drive to fat32 mac