Beyond the question of storage space, you'll also need to consider durability, speeds, the kind of USB port in play, the drive's physical size, and the price. Of course, not all drives provide the same experience. That's not really a problem for backup purposes, but if you want to bring a library of HD movies or photos with you wherever you go, a thumb drive is often much more convenient. Whether you're looking to quickly transfer your vacation photos or you need to make sure the sales team has the latest version of a PowerPoint presentation, flash drives are a smart idea.ĭepending on your cloud service and the speed of your internet connection (Opens in a new window), syncing large files to the web can take hours. Many of us have turned to cloud storage whenever we need to save or transfer files, but the simple reality is that local storage-in the form of USB flash drives-still has the advantage of speed and reliability.

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How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad.How to Block Robotexts and Spam Messages.Any changes you make on files on this system is permanent. The only drawback of exFAT is that it doesn’t support Journaling, i.e., cannot keep track of file changes. You can have a maximum of 4GB size limit per file which is not ideal. Now you can plug into any OS – even Linux, and it will work in reading and write mode. You might argue why not use FAT32 which works for both the OS’s.

Click Start and close this window when finished.

In the File System dropdown, choose exFAT.

Open up File Explorer and right-click on the drive.

Plug-in your drive into the computer’s USB port.

After these steps, everything will be lost forever. It is where exFAT or Extended File Allocation Table comes into the picture. If you don’t know, exFAT was created to be used on flash drives like USB or SD cards. So the question is how do you format a hard drive using exFAT? The answer is even more straightforward.īefore we go ahead, if you have anything on your drive, make sure to backup everything. So I needed a format which is both read and write on both the systems. I am the kind of person who needs to switch between both the OS daily.

Thumb drive for mac and pc