If the drive is listed as NTFS-formatted, you're going to need to format it to something else if you want full compatibility with Mac OS X. If the drive's format comes up as MS-DOS (FAT) or, less likely, ExFAT, you may be able to simply leave the drive as-is and not bother reformatting it. Your new drive should appear in the left-hand column, and clicking the "Partition" tab will bring up info on the drive which includes its current format. How do you tell which format your brand-new USB drive has? Hook it up to your Mac and launch the Disk Utility app, located in your Utilities folder (which is in Applications). If the drive comes formatted in NTFS, which is the default file system for Windows, you're going to want to re-format the drive because Mac OS X can't write files to NTFS-formatted volumes (at least not without a bunch of extra work that's beyond the scope of this article). The first format, FAT32, is fully compatible with Mac OS X, though with some drawbacks that we'll discuss later. I have some Nexxtech 16GB drives that still give me the FAT32 option as default.The overwhelming majority of USB flash drives you buy are going to come in one of two formats: FAT32 or NTFS. Just a note: If you insert a smaller drive that originally had FAT32 as the file system, then that option would be available as the default. I inserted the drive and right-clicked on it when it displayed in File Explorer and clicked on Format in the Context menu but NTFS and exFAT were the only two options. I wanted it formatted as FAT32, but the option was not available when I tried to format it. Her drive was a 64GB SanDisk Cruzer Glide and formatted with the exFAT option. This example is from my hard drive, which is NTFS. If you right-click on any drive and go into Properties, you can see which format your drive is using. It’s most compatible with cameras and with USB plugins in cars. From experience, I can tell you that FAT32 is the best to use. When I copy music to flash drives, one thing I check is the file system format. She wanted to play the music in her car through the USB plugin. A woman came to me because she wanted some music copied from her phone to a USB flash drive.
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