USB sticks

Vultch

Vultch

Well-known member
Did you know the max file size you can move to a USB flash drive is 4.3 GBytes if its formatted as FAT32.

I was at a local TV station moving some video files between my Mac and a PC, we grabbed a 16 Gbyte flash drive formatted it in the PC and used it to carry files less than 4Gbytes, all ok.
Then the third file which was over 5 Gbytes would not move. After much head scratching and a re compress still no success, but then google is my friend

Hours wasted trying to figure out if my 5 Gbyte video file was somehow corrupted...

I reformatted it to exFAT and all was well.
 
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You can also format USB keys with the Windows NTFS partition format, which also removes the 4GB file size limitation. ( Note: NTFS is READ-ONLY on the Mac )
 
Many thanks for this information; I had the same thing happen to me a few weels ago and had to burn the data to a DVD because I couldn't figure it out. Actually, I still can't, so I'd be grateful if someone would explain how to "reformatted it to exFAT" (I use a PC rather than a Mac if that makes any difference).
 
Windows and i parted company many yrs ago hence being caught out by the FAT 32 format.

David if i were you in PC land I would format my drives in the NTFS system, Windows having two means of formatting a drive (FAT32 and NTFS) most of these pen flash drives are preformatted in the older FAT32 system, NTFS can carry much bigger files than FAT32 as has been posted above.

the exFAT system is meant to get over the 4Gbyte problem but its not all plain sailing some windows machines dont like it.
 
Mac's can read NTFS drives by default, but not write to them. However, there are free and for pay plugins that will let you read and write NTFS drives on a Mac. Just google Mac NTFS and you'll find a couple free and pay options. I prefer exFAT, but if you're not sure, you can use NTFS pretty well on the mac.
 
The only real drawback to using the exFAT formatting is that exFAT partitions only use one file allocation table, where standard FAT32 or NTFS partitions have two file allocation tables. File allocation tables record where your files are physically stored on the drive, so if they become corrupt you may lose ALL of your files. Having a second copy of the file allocation table means there is less chance of ever losing files if one of these tables becomes corrupt.

Wikipedia File Allocation Table
 
Vultch said:
Windows and i parted company many yrs ago hence being caught out by the FAT 32 format.
Click to expand...

Any drive/card/memory unit meant to be usable by both PCs and Macs out of the box will be formatted as FAT32, because it can be used by both, whereas the file systems which have file size limits higher than 4GB can't be.

If something is meant to be Windows-only, it'll be formatted NTFS. If it's meant to be Mac-only, it'll be formatted HFS+. But if it's meant to be usable by both, it'll be formatted FAT32.
 
The exFAT format can be used to store files larger than 4GB on Windows XP / Vista / Win 7 / Win 8 / Mac OS-X operating systems.
 
Yeah, but you won't find drives fomatted with it out of the box, because it doesn't have universal support -- some versions of both Windows and OS X don't support it.
 
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