You should go ahead and format your storage drive with exFAT instead of FAT32, assuming that all devices you want to use the drive support exFAT. Therefore, it’s perfect for a USB flash drive or external disk, especially when you need to save files more than 4GB in size. Note that there is another file system called FAT32 that pretty much does the same thing but with one major flaw.
In other words, you can access the drive and transfer data without any hassles. If your disk was initially formatted to NTFS on a PC (or HFS+ on a Mac), most likely you’ll suffer limitations, for example, the data on your drive can’t be read or written on one of your computers.įortunately, there is a file system (actually two, I’ll explain) that you can format your flash drive to be fully compatible with Mac and PC.
If you have a USB drive, and you plan to use it on both a Mac and PC, things can get a bit tricky here. By default, Macs are with HFS+ (since 2017 there’s new Apple File System, APFS, optimized for flash storage), while PCs are with NTFS. It’s no surprise that PCs and Macs do not work well with each other, due to differences between the two operating systems (Windows vs.
