It is easy and completely free to format a UBS drive on Mac using Disk Utility. How to format a USB drive to FAT32 on Mac? You can install an NTFS for Mac driver to make the NTFS partitions writable on Mac. Mac can read Windows MTFS file system but write support is restricted. In addition to FAT32 and exFAT, NTFS is another very common disk format for Windows hard drives. You have a full read and write access to files stored on a FAT32 USB drive as you do with a disk that is formatted with a macOS-friendly file system like HFS or HFS+.

Yes, all versions of Mac OS X such as Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, and newer macOS such as Catalina, Big Sur, and Monterey can read the FAT32 file system without installing any additional driver, software, or plug-in.Īfter you connect a device with a FAT32 format to your Mac desktop or laptop, you will see the device mounted and show up across the macOS platforms including the Finder, the desktop, the Disk Utility, and System Information. Can Mac Recognize and Read exFAT External Drives?ĮxFAT file system breaks the maximum file size limit of 4 GB and read to know if Mac can read exFAT in this article. As a result, it limits the length of a file name to 4 bytes in the directory table, which means your file name can contain 255 characters at the maximum. Moreover, the maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte. To promote users to use the NTFS file system, Windows has set a 32 GB partition size limit for the FAT/FAT32 file system. However, Windows does not make it easy to format a partition larger than 32 GB with the FAT32 file system. In order to overcome the volume size limit for FAT16 which is 2 GB, the largest volume size FAT32 supports is 2 terabytes with a cluster size of 512 bytes and 16TB with a cluster size of 4,096 bytes. It is widely used for USB flash drives, flash memory cards, and external hard drives for compatibility between all platforms. It is a disk format or file system used to store, organize, and retrieve files stored on a disk drive. How to format a USB drive to FAT32 on Mac?įAT32 (File Allocation Table32) is the 32-bit version of the FAT file system designed by Microsoft and introduced in 1996 with Windows 95 OSR2.

Read below to know what FAT32 is, how it performs on Mac, and how to format a USB drive to FAT32 on Mac. Mac can read and recognize any device that comes with a FAT32 file system and mount it automatically with full access in the Finder and the desktop. FAT32 is ideal for a storage larger than 2GB and want to use it on Windows, macOS, PlayStation, camera, or car stereo for its universality.

The overwhelming majority of USB flash drives come with FAT32 or NTFS.

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