Instead, pick ExFAT, its replacement (and still quite old), best used on drives of 32GB or larger capacity. Designed for an earlier time, it can’t handle files larger than 4GB.

If you’re both Mac users, swell with Mac and Windows in the mix, you might be tempted to pick FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.īut FAT32 is distinctly out of date. But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to someone else. For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory.