USB and FAT32Įven though NTFS has been around for almost 25 years and is the default file system on just about every Windows PC, USB drives are still sold as FAT32. Reformatting will erase any files left on the drive. After reformatting, you can place your files from wherever you put them. While very space efficient, exFAT is only really used on MicroSD cards over 32GB. Copy existing files on the drive somewhere, then reformat the thumb drive to ExFat, using disk utility, and you will be able to copy larger files.
Drag the files from a Mac local volume or folder and drop the data into the external hard drive. Open the internal disk or folder, where you saved essential files for copying or transferring. It also brought file permissions, better compression, fault tolerance, shadow copy and encryption capability.Ī different type of FAT system exFAT was introduced to replace FAT32 that had a theoretical file size limit of 16 exabytes and a theoretical storage limit of 128 petabytes. Transfer or Copy Files from Mac to External Hard Drive. It can handle files up to 16TB in size and storage capacities of up to 256TB. It overcame the file naming and size limitations of FAT and introduced some other neat features. SOLUTION 1 - Format in exFAT exFAT file system that allows a single file larger than 4GB to be stored on the device. Formatting will delete all the data in your device. Formatting the flash drive as exFAT or NTFS will resolve this issue.
NTFS, the New Technology File System, was introduced in 1993 in Windows NT. In this tutorial you will learn how to fix File Is Too Large for Destination File System USB Flash Drive Fat32 without formatting. Files larger than 4GB can NOT be stored on a FAT32 volume. File size limits for FAT32 are 4GB per file at a maximum storage capacity of 2TB. FAT32 was introduced in Windows 95 and was capable of handling larger files and larger storage. It was able to work with larger files and longer names but was still limited.
The USB flash drive installer can now be used to install Windows on your Mac.
FAT16 was the interim solution and was introduced in 1984. When finished, the root folder of the USB flash drive should appear as shown below.