Though Windows file systems work the same regardless of drive type I wanted to expand on his piece a bit by including the system called exFAT, so in this piece I’ll discuss the three file systems, their pluses and negatives, and which one to use according to your needs.įat32: This is the old standby, and the file system that is usually pre-installed on any USB key you buy from the store. My colleague wrote about this previously in regards to external drives, but he was discussing high-capacity hard drives you plug into your PC. In dealing with this it occurred to me that Majid probably isn’t alone, and people might not be aware of the fact that you can format a USB key in Windows using one of three available file systems, and that each system has both advantages and limitations. He sent me a screenshot that clearly indicated the problem, as it read “The file is too large for the destination file system.” I replicated the issue quite easily by trying to move a 10GB file to a Fat32 disk, as Fat32 can’t handle any file larger than 4GB.įAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation, making it tough to copy HD or 4K video footage. Select 'OK' in the completion window to finish.Majid was unable to copy a movie from his PC to his newly acquired 32GB USB key, and wondered why.The process will take less than a minute. Select NTFS for the File System type and check the Quick Format checkbox.NOTE: Be sure you selected the correct drive icon for the “My Passport” external drive. Right click on the drive icon for the external drive and choose ' Format' from the menu.In Windows 8, you can choose the 'This PC' tile from the start screen.In Windows 7, this can be done by clicking the start button and choosing 'Computer' from the right panel of the menu.Open ' Computer' (there are multiple ways this can be done).Connect the external drive to the computer.If you have already saved files to the drive that you want to keep then don’t format the drive. WARNING: All data on the external hard drive will be erased by this procedure. NTFS partitions have a file size limit only limited by the partition size. To get around this problem or prevent it from being a problem later you could format the drive as an NTFS partition. You could save the file to an NTFS partition or a DVD. When trying to copy files to the drive you may get prompted to do a disk clean up but this will not resolve the problem. This may be a problem for larger files, such as video files, disk images, or large Outlook PST files. The maximum file size on a FAT32 partition is 4gb. A new Western Digital external drive is configured by default out of the box as a FAT32 partition.

Format external hdd to fat32