Part 2: What Should You Do before Formatting a USB Drive?Ī USB drive may contain songs, videos, documents, important files, etc. The purpose of its development was to be a better version of the FAT16 in terms of speed, performance, robustness, flexibility, and to support larger volumes. Part 1: What is FAT32 Format?įAT32 is an improved version of the FAT system which was introduced in 1996 by Microsoft with its Window95 OSR2 system.
So learning how to format your USB to a new file system is something that will come in handy. Sometimes, certain devices may only read specific USB file systems. The USB flash drive can be formatted in a variety of ways like depending upon the operating system and other features. These flash drives are plugged into several different devices and hence are at risk of corruption or malfunctioning and might require to be formatted at times. From listening to music to transferring important files from pc to pc, we use flash drives for a variety of reasons. USB drives are something of daily use for a modern-day person. As I mentioned before, Windows has its own Flash drive format tool. In Windows 10, go to This PC Manage Disk Management. Follow the 3-step guide here to format to FAT32: Step 1. USB requirements: Similar to the Explorer, your USB drive has to be under 32GB in order to format to FAT32 within the program. Format USB/External Drive to FAT32 with Disk Management. Therefore, to format a drive in FAT32 format, you will have to either use a third-party FAT32 format utility, or manually force Windows to format your drive as FAT32 from the command line using diskpart.
Choose your USB Drive, right click the mouse and choose Format. Please make sure you have back up the files. Note: The steps below will format the USB Drive.
Meanwhile, macOS can only read NTFS drives, and you would need to install third-party software to write back to the drive. Every major operating system will allow you to read and write from a USB flash drive that's formatted to FAT32. FAT32 compared to other formats Of those three common formats, FAT32 is the oldest and most widely supported.