![]() Right-click on the drive you want to format, click on Format. Press Windows logo key + E to open File Explorer. ![]() Option 1: Format a USB drive as EexFAT in This PC. Note: If you have important data on your USB flash drive, you should backup your drive before formatting it. There are several ways to format drive in Windows PC, you can do that in This PC or in Disk Management. How to format a USB flash drive as exFAT on Windows PC Be sure to eject the disk before you remove it from your Mac. This will erase all the files on the drive. Click the Erase button when you are done and the Disk Utility will format your disk with the settings you specified. Then select the default GUID Partition Map (GPT) scheme. You will be asked to provide the disk name and then select the file system as exFAT. If you have a USB flash drive inserted in your Mac, you can see it under the External in the Disk Utility. Go to Open Disk Utility, which is located under Applications in the Finder menu. To format a drive on a Mac, you'll need the built-in Disk Utility application. You will see the drive's file system shown on the right "Format".įormatting a drive will erase it completely, so make sure you have everything backed up that you want to keep. Right-click the drive icon in the Finder sidebar (or on the desktop) and select Get Info. So how do you know if your USB drive is in the correct format? You do not need to do anything special on the "Disk Utility" - simply insert the USB drive and open Finder. How to format a USB drive as exFAT on Mac Part 2: Format a USB drive as exFAT on Windows.Part 1: Format a USB drive as exFAT on Mac.You can format the drive on your Mac or Windows computer. If you plan on using an external drive with both Macs and PCs, you should format the disk with the exFAT file system instead. By default, Macs use HFS, while PCs use NTFS, which are not compatible with each other. Since the PC and Mac are two different operating systems, they use different file systems. Hopefully you now know which options above to pick from the list of best formats for external hard drives, which can save your bacon when making the wrong choice can lead to a situation where an external disk just won’t plug-and-play.How to Format a USB Drive as exFAT for Mac and Windows Compatibility Picking the wrong one can turn into a real pain when you have to backup and reformat an entire drive because it won’t work for its intended purpose. Picking a format for your external drive can be pretty confusing. In fact, most devices have an internal SD card formatting routine, so we recommend you simply let the intended device format the card. exFAT is still a good choice if your DSLR (for example) supports it, but follow the manufacturer’s recommendation. With SD cards, your choice should be entirely driven by which formats the devices you use support. However, that’s set to change in the future. Of course, if you’re also going to use your thumb drive on your current Linux machine, exFAT won’t work at the time of writing. Especially if you also want to use your thumb drive with iPads, iPhones and Macs.įAT32 is a fallback if you want to use your thumb drive with older devices that don’t support exFAT. Which means you may want to use large files, such as HD video files, on your thumb drive. With the fairly cheap yet large flash drives we have today, there’s some overlap in the use cases for thumb drives and external hard drives. ![]() SD cards and USB thumb drives are still an important part of our digital lives, so which formats should you pick? The choice for the best format for external hard drives involves different considerations compared to other forms of external storage. Unfortunately, Linux does not yet have support for exFAT, but that is reportedly set to change with the release of Kernel 5.4. ![]() The most compatible option is FAT32, but as we mentioned above it has a hard 4GB limit on file sizes. However, Linux supports NTFS, which makes for a decent go-between if you have both Windows and Linux machines. Linux has its own proprietary EXT formats and if you are only going to use your external drive with a Linux machine, you can safely go ahead and pick that format. Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Linux are becoming more popular by the day, but are still relatively niche overall. ![]()
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