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Formatting a USB drive involves a lot more than simply making your USB drive compatible with your operating system.
It’s a fairly simple process that shouldn’t take more than a few seconds. Whether you are a macOS or Windows user, this article will help you!
Format variations
Before explaining how to format your USB drive, it’s important to know what the available options actually mean. As you follow the steps below, you will notice some formats that most everyday users are not familiar with.
FAT(16/32) – This stands for File Allocation Table, a format supported by macOS, Windows, and even Linux. This format uses less disk space and at the same time makes disk writing procedures run faster.
NTFS – This stands for New Technology File System and is not compatible with all operating systems. NTFS gives you more encryption options and compresses large files.
ExFAT – The extension file mapping table format is compatible with later versions of macOS, Windows, and Linux systems. The ExFat format is the one to use if you need to store larger files on multiple platforms.
Now that we have a very basic understanding of your options, let’s move on to review how you can make the appropriate changes.
How to format a USB drive on Windows PC
Formatting a USB drive in Windows is usually very easy; This is how you do it.
Step one
Type “This PC” into Cortana’s search bar. Click on the first option that appears.
Second step
Open the application and right click on the USB drive you want to format.
You can also right-click the USB drive in the left menu to access settings.
Step three
Click “Format.”
Step four
A pop-up window will appear and this is where you can make your formatting selections. Choose the options that best suit your needs and click “Start.”
Step five
A warning will appear informing you that all information on the USB drive will be erased. When you’re ready, click “OK.”
Wait for the process to complete and then exit through the window. Now you can use your USB drive however you want.
If you are using an older version of Windows, you may need to access Windows Explorer and then follow similar steps.
How to format a USB drive on a Mac
Apple doesn’t make formatting your USB drive as easy as Windows does. Therefore, we will guide you through two scenarios to get your Drive working properly.
The disk is not readable
This is a very common error that occurs when you first insert your USB drive. But don’t worry, we know how to fix it.
Step one
At the error message, click “Initialize.” If nothing happens, head to your Finder and click “Applications” on the left side.
Second step
From here, use the search bar in the top right corner to type “Disk Utility.” Click on it.
Step three
Right click on your USB drive (use Control+Click on a Macbook). Select “Delete.” In the new pop-up window, change the format.
When you’re ready, click “Delete” again. Let the process complete and your USB drive will appear.
Format a readable USB drive
If you do not have the problem described above, simply follow these steps:
Step one
To format a USB on a Mac, you can format your drive using Disk Utility.
You’ll find this tool in your Applications folder, inside the Utilities subfolder, or simply search Spotlight to find it (press Cmd+Space, then type its name).
Second step
When Disk Utility opens, you’ll see a list of drives in the left pane, with the partitions for each nested below each entry. To reformat your USB drive, click its name in this panel, then switch to the Erase tab in the main interface (if it is not already selected) and press Erase to erase the drive just like we did before.
Choose the correct format
If you follow the instructions above, Windows will, by default, format your drive using Microsoft’s NTFS file system, while a Mac might suggest the Mac OS Extended file system.
These formats are sensible defaults because they support all the features of their respective operating systems, such as native compression and encryption. However, neither is suitable if you want to move files back and forth between Mac and PC: OS X can read NTFS volumes, but cannot write to them, while Windows in its default configuration cannot access HFS+ disks. absolutely. There are free drivers available, but again they are limited to read-only access.
Therefore, to use your USB drive on both Windows and OS X, you will need to use a different file system. You can choose this from the drop-down menu in the Windows Format dialog box or in the Erase panel of Disk Utility. In most cases, we recommend that you select Microsoft’s exFAT format: this will give you full read and write access on both Windows (Vista or later) and OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later).
If you need compatibility with older systems, you will need to fall back to the old FAT32 format. This is supported on all versions of Windows and OS big size.
On a Mac, you can format any disk as FAT32 by simply choosing “MS-DOS (FAT)” from the Disk Utility drop-down menu before clicking Erase…. For historical reasons, Windows will not offer FAT32 as an option if Your drive is larger than 32 GB, but you can format a drive of any size by opening a command prompt and typing format h: /fs:fat32 /qwhere h: is the letter of your removable drive and the /q parameter specifies a quick format, assuming you don’t want to wait for Windows to check each sector of the drive for errors.
How to Format a USB Drive: Allocation Drive Size
In addition to choosing a disk format, Windows also invites you to specify an “Allocation Drive Size.” Simply put, this determines the size of the chunks in which storage is allocated for your files: if you choose 4096 bytes (the NTFS default), each file saved to that disk will be allocated space in multiples of 4KB.
Splitting disk space this way is not perfectly efficient. A file that is only 1 KB in size will still take up 4 KB of space, while a 5 KB file will take up 8 KB, and so on. However, in practice, most of the files on your USB drive will probably be many megabytes in size, so the impact of wasting a few kilobytes here and there is negligible.
If you plan to save a lot of small files to your drive, then it might be a good idea to reduce the allocation unit size. However, this can have a negative impact on performance, especially if you use a mechanical disk drive. Splitting a file into more chunks gives the drive controller more work to do and makes it more likely that the data will end up fragmented into many blocks scattered around the disk, making access slower.
With a modern flash drive, you’re unlikely to notice much difference either way, so it’s up to you whether you stick to the 4KB standard or choose a smaller allocation unit size.
