Solved How to Format 5TB drive to fat 32

hsehestedt · Aug 16, 2023

ZERO269 said:
exFat offers greater performance for EXTERNAL storage; primarily SSDs.

No!

At least on Windows, TRIM is not supported on exFAT drives. Avoid this at all costs on an SSD, either internal or external. You want ONLY NTFS for an SSD.

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

cereberus said:
You are confusing things.

MBR (legacy bios) and UEFI are how the drives are set up.

NTFS, fat32 etc are how individual partitions are formatted. This is independent of whether drive is setup as UEFI or legacy bios.

But it is NOT independent of the OS I was referring to in the general context of our dialog. No confusion here. Old legacy PC with BIOS running XP wants MBR. If you carefully read that quote you will see that I was referring to an older operating system. I was asked if there is something else that might be helpful to know. NTFS, Fat32, ex Fat32, etc. are file allocations. MBR, GPT, Logical, etc are formats. I was also trying to keep it in simple layman's terms to be easy to understand.

Firas · Aug 16, 2023

A file cannot be transferred to a FAT32 partition if the file is larger than 4GB. FAT32 max partition size is 2TB. If you have a 3TB drive or larger, you would not be able to format it as a single FAT32 partition.

Link

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

Firas said:
A file cannot be transferred to a FAT32 partition if the file is larger than 4GB. FAT32 max partition size is 2TB. If you have a 3TB drive or larger, you would not be able to format it as a single FAT32 partition.

Link

Apparently, it can be done with specialized tools. I've not tried it myself and I am informed that Microsoft discourages this.

Firas · Aug 16, 2023

Scannerman said:
Apparently, it can be done with specialized tools. I've not tried it myself and I am informed that Microsoft discourages this.

Good Luck
why not just format NTFS and make life easier?

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

Firas said:
Good Luck
why not just format NTFS and make life easier?

Good question. If you read through the entire thread you will discover that this is the advice and encouragement that has already been offered. It appears that the OP has followed this advice and is pleased with the results so essentially the issue is solved. The thread is morphing into other things now, which is commonly the case :wink:

Firas · Aug 16, 2023

Scannerman said:
If you read through the entire thread

You're correct, I didn't read the entire thread.

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

Hey, at least you also gave good advice!

Welcome to the crew!

erpster4 · Aug 16, 2023

time to mark this whole thread as "Solved"

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

erpster4 said:
time to mark this whole thread as "Solved"

Maybe about 20 posts ago?

Hazel123 · Aug 16, 2023

I've marked it as solved

It's all interesting stuff though! It's had my head in a spin - the idea that for about 14 years I had this belief that NTFS was ONLY for operating systems or system images. And copying and pasting files and documents couldn't be done on NTFS and had to be done on Fat 32 or Fat. And have believed that for so long it's a bit of a shock to find out that isn't the case! I can't remember where the info came from originally.

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

I luv it when a plan comes together.

Hazel123 · Aug 16, 2023

It probably wasn’t an issue in 2009 with an 8gb drive in a netbook

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

OMGG No offence but I really hate those things. Can't tell you how many of those things people have brought me because they maxed out their card. They treat them like they're regular laptops and they're not. I even had one person try to game on their netbook. They got the game installed and it locked up on them because the card had no more room. Usually I can save them but they are such a waste of money. Better off getting a tablet.

MisterEd · Aug 16, 2023

Hazel123 said:
It probably wasn’t an issue in 2009 with an 8gb drive in a netbook

Aah...the good old days before FAT32. Before then you had the 2GB partition/drive size limit.

Hazel123 · Aug 16, 2023

Scannerman said:
OMGG No offence but I really hate those things. Can't tell you how many of those things people have brought me because they maxed out their card. They treat them like they're regular laptops and they're not. I even had one person try to game on their netbook. They got the game installed and it locked up on them because the card had no more room. Usually I can save them but they are such a waste of money. Better off getting a tablet.

Ha ha. Yes it was ridiculous but I did love the little Eee PC's - I think they had a bit of a cult following too. I had a few. They were selling for peanuts after a few years so I used to buy them, upgrade them and sell them on. They were good for kids. As netbooks they were ok. I upgraded mine to a 64gb hard drive. Still have it but it's not much use now. It has linux on but is too slow to use now. The one with the 4gb drive wasn't really useable.

Scannerman · Aug 16, 2023

Hazel123 said:
Ha ha. Yes it was ridiculous but I did love the little Eee PC's - I think they had a bit of a cult following too. I had a few. They were selling for peanuts after a few years so I used to buy them, upgrade them and sell them on. They were good for kids. As netbooks they were ok. I upgraded mine to a 64gb hard drive. Still have it but it's not much use now. It has linux on but is too slow to use now. The one with the 4gb drive wasn't really useable.

I spoiled my girls and bought them all real laptops when one of them came home with a GOOGLE abomination compliments of the school. Told her to take it back and don't ever bring that thing back in the house again. It was a Chromebook. I seriously don't know how they expect kids to use such complete and utter garbage to do homework on. Chromebooks need a new entry in the dictionary under the word "sluggish". Might as well go back to dial up. Sorry. I no like it, I no like it, I no like it.

Hazel123 · Aug 17, 2023

This was when there weren't many tablets around (and sometimes even before tablets and chrome books). I think they had their purpose. Very portable and for web surfing (the 7" ones). A lot of people were anti tablets at the time. The 8gb ones would run linux and childrens educational software. It was ridiculous selling the 4gb ones though as XP wouldn't fit on it with updates. A lot of computers were pretty rubbish at that time as well! With only 512gb ram! The Eee 701SD with ssd and 2gb ram was better than a 14" laptop with a pentium processor and 512gb ram and portable. Surprisingly a lot of people like typing on the small keyboard. I'm only talking about the 7" ones and they were a bit of a cult. The problem with tablets is - they don't have a keyboard. I still don't like them.

Scannerman · Aug 17, 2023

Oh, so they were like the tablets of yesteryear then. Good grief. My wife's e-reader has more storage than those things.

MisterEd · Aug 17, 2023

Scannerman said:
I spoiled my girls and bought them all real laptops when one of them came home with a GOOGLE abomination compliments of the school. Told her to take it back and don't ever bring that thing back in the house again. It was a Chromebook. I seriously don't know how they expect kids to use such complete and utter garbage to do homework on. Chromebooks need a new entry in the dictionary under the word "sluggish". Might as well go back to dial up. Sorry. I no like it, I no like it, I no like it.

Our public schools give all the student grades 2-12 laptops. I think K-1 kids share tablets. They mainly use the laptops to access a remote server to access all their school work including their books. I don't know what kind of laptops they are given but I am not sure if their speeds matter much. The school system leases them so they are replace with new one every 3-4 years. BTW, the remote computer the students access is a supercomputer so has plenty of resources to handle all the users.