USB 3 Devices Not Working in USB 2 Ports

So my TV has a USB 2 port that you can play media from. In this case it is music. My car has the same feature and it is really convenient for both. I like having music on the TV when I am baking or doing housework.

Making a new flash drive full of music, I was only able to buy a USB 3 flash drive. I loaded all the music on it with my PC and plugged it in. The flash drive cannot be read. I plugged it back into my computer, and the music is all well and good. So I tried again. No joy. I then took the drive out to my car and plugged it in. No joy either.

Is there some fundamental difference in the file structure on a USB 3 drive that would prevent it from being read in a USB 2 port? Or is it just a controller compatibility problem?

I have since found a USB 2 flash drive so no worries, but I was wondering if anyone else has ever seen this issue?

I've not had problems interchanging USB Thumb drives but for some things it may be important to know that Thumb drives usually come formatted as FAT32 and devices may not work with other formats such as NTFS. A limitation of FAT32 is single-file-size of 4GB but that doesn't keep the from being read, just can't copy large files to it. The transfer speed of data is slower for the USB 2. The FAT32 format has a limit in Windows of 32GB when reformatting. I do larger ones in Linux with GPARTED.

Recently I had seen a TV manual state that any external USB device needs to be registered with the TV, before the TV will recognise it. Maybe you could check to see if that applies to your TV, too.

Otherwise, @Berton has good advise about disk formats.

I just purchased cheap flash drives exfat. I like to reformat as NTFS these would not change.

Thanks @iko22 and @Berton

I just thought it was weird that my USB 3 flash drive would work in both USB2 and USB3 ports in my computer, but not on the TV, which I know is USB2. I've never had a problem with any flash drive on the TV before, but they were all USB2 drives. The TV doesn't even detect the USB3 drive. You would think that I would at least get an error message.

I'm going to do what iko22 suggested and find my user manual. Maybe the TV does have particular requirements.

The manual should also say what the format of the drives should be, most will be FAT32 but for use on Windows could be NTFS and Mac OS X or the newer macOS can use exFAT.