USB Flash formatting preferences

What is your preference on Windows 11 for formatting flash drives, exFat, NTFS..... other?

It depends on what I am using it for. What is the intended use fot it?

@Porthos is exactly right. If I'm just making a bootable rescue drive to use with Macrium Reflect, I use FAT32. If I'm going to use the flash for file transfers to another PC, or for storing apps that can be run from a flash, I use NTFS. Some other uses require slightly more complex formatting and partitioning.

Just for general data file usage where FAT32 ( under 4 GB) has so far been adequate. But who knows about the future. Have you had any issues with exFAT format (16 GB max) on Windows 11? I haven't formatted a USB drive in quite some time.

Porthos is right.

- I have some Fat32 USB drives because they are Windows InstallUSBs as well as storing datafiles for me.
- I have one MicroSD card [in an SD card adapter] that lives in my main computer's otherwise-unused SD card slot. It contains automatically & regularly backed up copies of my most important files. It is Fat32 so that I can stick it in an SD-USB adapter, store it on my keyring when I go out and, if need be, connect it to my Android phone to read files that I don't normally keep on it. Android needs add-ons to cope with NTFS but not Fat32.


Denis

The USB drives I have up to 128GB have come factory-formatted as FAT32. Windows can't partition and format more than 32GB with its 4GB Single-file-size limit. exFAT can go larger, Mac OS X could read NTFS but not write without adding an App, don't know about the newer macOS. I use GPARTED program on Linux for more formatting types, have done a 500GB HDD as FAT32 which Windows can read.

I read somewhere while browsing that someone said they had trouble with exFAT on Windows 11. From your experiences, is there anything to that?

I would normally test this out, but I don't have a spare flash drive right now...... waiting on a few currently.

I haven't had any issues with exFAT except it not being useful for bootable drives. For cross-platform storage it probably is the best.

Berton said:

I haven't had any issues with exFAT except it not being useful for bootable drives. For cross-platform storage it probably is the best.

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Interesting. I'll keep that in mind. Thanks, and thanks to everyone else that replied.

I have over 100 USB flash drives including sizes ranging from 4GB to 1TB and I use a variety of formats, as was noted earlier, mainly depending upon the purpose. However, BY FAR, my most used file system is NTFS. I do this because I rely upon being able to have all the security options that NTFS affords me including BitLocker. Yes, you do not need to have NTFS for that, but I like consistency whenever possible.

That said, if I have to have a bootable disk that will work with all systems (some won't boot from NTFS formatted flash drives) I will use FAT32.

EDIT: Lately, I have gotten a couple of PNY flash drives that look just like any other flash drive, in fact they are physically smaller than a lot of them, but they are "real" SSDs including support for TRIM. If you have a flash drive that supports TRIM, you better use NTFS!

Well, you can have your cake and eat it.

Just create two partitions e.g. 6 gb fat32 partition and use rear of space and use rest of spae as exFat or NTFS.

Berton said:

The USB drives I have up to 128GB have come factory-formatted as FAT32. Windows can't partition and format more than 32GB with its 4GB Single-file-size limit. exFAT can go larger, Mac OS X could read NTFS but not write without adding an App, don't know about the newer macOS. I use GPARTED program on Linux for more formatting types, have done a 500GB HDD as FAT32 which Windows can read.

Click to expand...

Supposedly, FAT32 supports drives up to 16TB, although Windows won't format one larger than 32GB.


I haven't experimented with large FAT32 partitions.

I don't know whether you can boot a UEFI PC by using a USB drive with a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

The Rufus utility works around the difficulty in creating a bootable USB drive when install.wim is larger than 4GB by creating a FAT32 boot partition plus an NTFS partition for the files.

bobkn said:

I don't know whether you can boot a UEFI PC by using a USB drive with a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

Click to expand...

The MCT tool of Microsoft's reformats a USB Thumb drive [there's a warning about it doing that] as FAT32 before writing data, I remember inadvertently using a 64GB but couldn't access more than half.

Berton said:

The MCT tool of Microsoft's reformats a USB Thumb drive [there's a warning about it doing that] as FAT32 before writing data, I remember inadvertently using a 64GB but couldn't access more than half.

Click to expand...

Right.

But I rarely, if ever, use the Media Creation Tool to create a bootable drive. I usually get an ISO (using MCT or from uupdump.net), and work from that. (Including using the DISM command line utility to split install.wim into chunks FAT32 can accept. Even though I'm about 99% clueless about DISM.)

And MCT tool is redundant.

I work with some large files, so it is usually NTFS for me. I do have a couple of FAT32 formatted thumb drives, but I use those as offline storage for files I need at work regularly and they are nice and small.

An example of creating the USB Thumb drive on a large drive [128GB] using the MCT:

But links seem to be supported on exfat. Is Wikipedia wrong? Or does it only work in Windows.


If the flash drive is used for temporary file storage then exfat, if it is used as an external file storage device then ntfs.

Always use Ventoy. Forget that MCT exists, and foget that Rufus exists (I mean, sure... Ventoy is based on Rufus, but then, just because a car has four wheels and a horse also has four legs, doesn't also mean everyone should still continue to ride a horse to travel to the grocery store especially in 2024, like, IMO anyway... ). Ventoy

bobkn said:

haven't experimented with large FAT32 partitions.

I don't know whether you can boot a UEFI PC by using a USB drive with a FAT32 partition larger than 32GB.

Click to expand...

What an interesting question.
The answer is Yes.
- I just formatted a 64GB USB as Fat32 using MiniTool,
- I used File explorer to copy all the contents of a Windows 11 InstallUSB I'd made a while back [Win11 v23H2 22631.2428],
- I stuck the USB in my [2023] Windows 11 Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 16,
- and I used the Boot options menu to run the InstallUSB as UEFI [my Boot options menu did not have any Legacy options].

- -


I'm glad you asked. I had not previously thought about that question.


Best wishes,
Denis