Nov 18, 2017 Use Disk Utility to Format USB Flash Drive on Mac The simplest way to format a disk in Mac OS is to simply use the Disk Utility since it is the Mac’s built in disk maintenance tool. To format USB drive on Mac using this method, all you need to do is plug in the USB device into your Mac and select it from the Disk Utility’s sidebar menu. With the fairly cheap yet large flash drives we have today, there’s some overlap in the use cases for thumb drives and external hard drives. Which means you may want to use large files, such as HD video files, on your thumb drive. That makes exFAT a good choice. Especially if you also want to use your thumb drive with iPads, iPhones and Macs.
Format USB Drive in Windows. The below steps for formatting external drive is for Windows 10 and also works the same with an old version of Windows. To format your external drive hard drive in Windows to use on Mac and PC platforms, first plug-in your drive with a Windows machine. Every newer file system handily whips FAT32 in the file size department, allowing for sometimes ridiculously large files. And when you look at volume size limits, FAT32 still lets you format volumes up to 8 TB, which is more than enough for a USB drive. Other files systems allow volume sizes all the way up into the exobyte and zetabyte range. Time Machine is a built-in feature of Mac that backs up your files to an external storage device such as your flash drive. Free up space in your flash drive. USB drives have limited memory space.
Have you ever formatted a disk on your own?
Or
Attempting to format a disk for the very first time?
Then, you should definitely read this post as it is going to tell you why it is important to set the right allocation unit size while formatting a drive.
Now, what do you mean by ‘Allocation unit size’?
It is also known as or can be addressed as ‘Cluster size’. The cluster size determines the can be defined as the tiniest chunk of disk space that holds a file.
When you begin to format a partition into one of the file systems such as NTFS, FAT, exFAT etc., Windows makes use of the default values if formatting is done by one of the following methods and they are:
- By using the ‘FORMAT’ command from the command line without mentioning the cluster size;
- When the Allocation Unit box in the Format dialog box lists Default Allocation Size while formatting a drive from Windows Explorer.
However, it is advisable to keep the allocation size small if lots of small files are present. This will help in saving disk space. But, if the size of the files is large, it is a good idea to keep the allocation size big. This will eventually enhance the system’s performance.
Our Hard drives are divided into clusters and the size of the allocation unit determine the size of a single cluster. The file system in which the hard drive is formatted keeps track or record of the state of the clusters present. When a file or a portion of the file is written on any cluster, it is marked as or considered to be occupied. If the size of the clusters is small, the speed with which the hard drive performs becomes slower. It happens because each file is broken into small pieces and it takes a significant amount of time gather all the broken pieces of the file in one place and access them as one.
And, if the size of the cluster is large, the space on the disk will be wasted.
Hence, there is no absolute benchmark for setting the size of the allocation unit. If the size of the files you wish to store on the drive is large then a large cluster size is recommended. This will also increase the speed with which the drive will perform. If you are planning to store smaller sized files than a small cluster size will do the deed. It will preserve the space on the disk.
Note: Formatting a drive into any file system comes with a catch. If the formatting is done in an improper way or if the process faces some kind of interruption, you may lose the data on your drive.
Format Flash Drive For Mac And Pc Large Files Recovery Software
Read: Here’s how you can retrieve an exFAT partition.