Did you know that by default, you are unable to save a file larger than 4gb onto your thumbdrive? As technology improves, thumb drives nowadays come with very large spaces but are defaulted to disallow files more than 4gb of size.

Granted, file sizes more than 4gb are quite rare, so not all of you will face this problem. Even so, sooner or later, we will encounter this problem so it would be good to be prepared.

The solution is quite simple. Just follow a couple of steps below and your thumb drive will be ready to accept ANY file sizes.

Technical box: Thumb drives by default are formatted as either FAT16 or FAT32. Being a very old technology, the maximum file size a FAT32 can handle is only up to 4gb. To solve this, all we need to do is to reformat the thumb drive to NTFS format. (a format that Windows XP has been using)

Step One. Plug in your Thumb Drive.

Step Two. Right click on My Computer Icon and select Manage

Step Three. Select Device Manager. Find the your USB Thumb Drive to the right. Right Click that and select Properties.

Step Four. Go to the Policies Tab. Select Optimized for performance. Click OK to continue.

Step Five. Close all windows. You are done with the settings. Now you have to format your Thumb Drive. IMPORTANT: Make sure you have nothing in your Thumb Drive that is important. If you do, save it on your desktop first.

Step Six. Open My Computer. Select your Thumbdrive. Right Click and Select Format. IMPORTANT: Make sure you read Step Five before continuing, you have been warned!

Step Seven. In the Format window, you can now select NTFS as the File system. Doing this will finally allow saving file sizes that are more than 4gb onto your thumb drive. Click Start to continue and wait for the formatting to complete.

And you are done! Go ahead and try saving a large file onto your thumb drive. Note that you have to do this once for every thumb drive you have. So just repeat the steps above and you will be fine.

Another important note: Once you have selected NTFS as your File system for your thumb drive, you MUST now select Safely Remove Hardware before you remove your Thumb Drive. Failing to do so will cause files to be corrupted on your thumb drives.

This also proves one thing I have been telling my friends all these while, if your thumb drives remained in its original file format of FAT32, there is absolutely NO NEED to Safely Remove Hardware before you unplug your thumb drives.

Three Cheers to those who have been clicking on the Safely Remove Hardware all these years.

 

 

(photo by existentist)