Notice that the default file system format for a drive or disk on MacOS X is “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”. On the left column make double sure that you have chosen the removable drive or disk that you want to reformat – you don’t want to erase your system drive by accident! – then click on “ Erase” along the top. It’s a 32GB, but there’s 1GB taken up by the file system itself, a pretty typical size. On the right you can see the overall usable space on the device as 30.98GB. Launch it with the drive you want to reformat as FAT plugged in, and you’ll see something like this:Īs you can see, I’ve already chosen the external USB flash drive “Kingston DataTraveler 3.0”. FAT32 also supports a 4GB limit to the size of individual files, plenty of space for just about all video files too.Īnyway, the program you want to use on your Mac is called Disk Utility and it’s found in the “Utilities” folder within your Applications folder. Why? Because by using 32 bit addressing, FAT32 can have partitions up to 2TB, significantly more than the 4GB limit of FAT16. FAT16 helped, but FAT32 is the only format in widespread use at this point. Back in the day, FAT was an 8-bit format and dramatically limited the maximum size of files. FAT, by the way, stands for “file allocation table”, it has nothing to do with weight or size! Fortunately, your Mac system is quite capable of formatting a disk drive or flash drive in FAT format as desired.Ī point of clarification before we go further, however: FAT and FAT32 are the same thing at this point in the evolution of hard disks and drive formats. Mac systems have always been able to work just fine with the Windows-based FAT file system, but not vice-versa: Apple File Systems (AFS) is not Windows compatible.
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