Find out how to format a USB thumb drive for each Mac and Windows
For these of us who not often switch recordsdata bodily throughout gadgets, file-format functionality could also be a distant reminiscence. It used to occupy plenty of consideration. But it nonetheless crops up everytime you’re making an attempt to place recordsdata on a USB thumb drive at hand off to another person. If you’re each Mac customers, swell; with Mac and Windows within the combine, you could be tempted to choose FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.
But FAT32 is distinctly outdated. Designed for an earlier time, it could’t deal with recordsdata bigger than 4GB. Instead, choose ExFAT, its alternative (and nonetheless fairly outdated), greatest used on drives of 32GB or bigger capability.
While first making certain you could have a duplicate of any information on a drive you need to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, comply with these steps:
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Attach the drive to your Mac.
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Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility).
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Select the drive within the left-hand sidebar.
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Click Erase.
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From the Format menu, choose ExFAT.
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From the Scheme menu, choose Master Boot Record.
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Click Erase and comply with prompts to verify.
Foundry
This Mac 911 article is in response to a query submitted by Macworld reader Robin.
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