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COPY A 10 gig file on flash drive

my flash drive tells me this is impossible because i am using fat 32 and 4 gigs is the maximum for 1 file

is there any way for me to format my flash drive so it works and can handle over 4 gigs

i have a mac and the flash drive is a 64 gig one

should i format it to exfat or something????

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

John

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Gary Case

Based on your question tags, it seems you want to use this on a Mac, so I agree ExFAT is your best choice.

You could also format it in NTFS, but that would only be read/write on Windows => on a Mac it would be read-only.

Note that there have been reports that some Macs won't format ExFAT correctly, so it's best to use Wndows to do the format. [Others haven't had a problem -- I suspect this is dependent on exactly which OS the Mac is running => clearly it's safest to just use a Windows machine if that's handy]

Dr. Klahn

If the file compresses well, you might run it through gzip or bzip2 at -9 compression, or RAR at maximum compression, and see if it comes down below 4 GB.

strung

It depends on what you are using the flash drive for. If you are using it exclusively between Mac computers, then format it in Apple Extended Format (Journalled). If the drive is to be read by Windows, then ExFat is a good solution, but I believe works only with Windows Vista and newer. I.e it won't work with Windows XP.

You can use NTFS if you download and install NTFS drivers for your Mac: http://www.macbreaker.com/2014/06/how-to-enable-writing-to-ntfs-hard.html

noxcho

Your USB Stick is formatted in FAT32 file system. And it has limitation of 4GB file size you can put onto it as a single file. So go on with ExFAT or if you have a driver called NTFS for MacOSX then format your USB stick as NTFS.

John

@slingingshot15 - Thanks.