Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc

#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc how to#
#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc mac os#
#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc drivers#
#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc full#

However, we also generate large files here as part of our scanning service, and thanks to the pathetic state of what passes as internet in this country, a lot of people do still use external hard drives and of course USB keys to share files with us.

In recent years, most files have begun to arrive electronically and we have a fast and reliable file upload tool you can use to send us files. With a modern flash drive, itвЂ™s unlikely youвЂ™ll notice much difference either way, so itвЂ™s up to you whether you stick to the 4KB standard or pick a smaller allocation unit size.At Image Science, we deal with files and storage devices all day every day. Splitting up a file into more chunks gives the drive controller more work to do, and makes it more likely that the data will end up fragmented into lots of blocks scattered about your disk, making it slower to access. However, this can have a negative impact on performance, especially if youвЂ™re using a mechanical disk drive. If you plan to save lots of small files to your disk then reducing the allocation unit size might be a good idea. In practice though, most of the files on your USB drive will probably be many megabytes in size, so the impact of wasting a few kilobytes here and there is negligible. A file thatвЂ™s only 1KB in size will still occupy 4KB of space, while a 5KB file will take up 8KB, and so on. Slicing up disk space in this way isnвЂ™t perfectly efficient. Simply put, this determines the size of the chunks in which storage is allocated for your files: if you choose 4096 bytes (the NTFS default), every file thatвЂ™s saved to that disk will be allocated space in multiples of 4KB.

#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc how to#

How to format a USB drive: allocation unit sizeДЄs well as choosing a disk format, Windows also invites you to specify an вЂњAllocation unit sizeвЂќ. For historical reasons, Windows wonвЂ™t offer FAT32 as an option if your disk is larger than 32GB, but you can format a disk of any size by opening a Command Prompt and typing format h: /fs:fat32 /q, where h: is the letter of your removable drive and the /q parameter specifies a quick format вЂ“ assuming you donвЂ™t want to wait around for Windows to check each sector of the drive for errors. On a Mac, you can format any disk as FAT32 by simply choosing вЂњMS-DOS (FAT)вЂќ from the dropdown menu in Disk Utility before you click EraseвЂ¦. This is supported by all versions of Windows and OS X (as well as Linux), but it has the drawback of not supporting individual files larger than 4GB вЂ“ which can be a pain if you work with large video files or databases. If you need compatibility with systems that are older than this, youвЂ™ll need to fall back to the ancient FAT32 format.

#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc full#

In most cases we recommend you select MicrosoftвЂ™s exFAT format: this will give you full read and write access in both Windows (Vista or later) and OS X (Snow Leopard 10.6.5 or later). You can choose this from the drop-down menu in WindowsвЂ™ Format dialogue, or in the Erase pane of Disk Utility. To use your USB disk on both Windows and OS X, therefore, youвЂ™ll need to use a different filesystem.

#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc drivers#

There are free drivers available, but again these are limited to read-only access. However, neither is suitable if you want to move files back and forth between Macs and PCs: OS X can read NTFS volumes, but it canвЂ™t write to them, while Windows in its default configuration canвЂ™t access HFS+ disks at all. These formats are sensible defaults because they support all the features of their respective operating systems, such as native compression and encryption.

#Formatting usb thumb drives for both mac and pc mac os#

If you follow the instructions above then Windows will, by default, format your disk using MicrosoftвЂ™s NTFS filesystem, while a Mac might suggest the Mac OS Extended filesystem.