For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory. It used to occupy a lot of attention. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to someone else. If you’re both Mac users, swell; with Mac and Windows in the mix, you might be tempted to pick FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.
But FAT32 is distinctly out of date. Designed for an earlier time, it can’t handle files larger than 4GB. Instead, pick ExFAT, its replacement (and still quite old), best used on drives of 32GB or larger capacity.
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While first ensuring you have a copy of any data on a drive you want to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, follow these steps:
Attach the drive to your Mac.
Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility).
Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar.
Click Erase.
From the Format menu, select ExFAT.
From the Scheme menu, select Master Boot Record.
Click Erase and follow prompts to confirm.
'SSD VS HDD, I want to use SSD as my boot drive since it has a better performance. MiniTool ShadowMaker can easily transfer my HDD to SSD without reinstalling OS.' In addition, if you only want to migrate Windows OS from HDD to SSD, you can ask another hard drive cloning software, MiniTool Partition Wizard, for help. Besides, some people like yours truly prefer to keep a bootable USB thumb drive in a safe place for times when something terribly wrong goes with their Mac. There are two ways to choosing a startup disk. One involves choosing a boot disk via a System Preferences pane called Startup Disk, which my colleague Jeff recently covered. Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled),” or your preferred format type. The former option can help ensure that the USB drive is made fully compatible with your Mac, since most USB drives are preformatted for Windows computers by default.
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This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Robin.
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