Why Is There Only 32GB Free on My 64GB Flash Drive?
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Welcome to Lifehacker Tech 911 for another week. And thanks to everyone who sent in their questions from last week’s post . If you haven’t noticed, don’t worry, you can still submit your challenging questions whenever you want. I will always have answers.
This week we’ll be talking about storage. Specifically, what to do if a purchased (slightly expensive) flash drive doesn’t give you the full storage space you need. As a Lifehacker “SK” reader writes:
My question is how to format a 64GB stick so that it can be used on both PC and Mac. If you do exfat it only formats 32GB. What are you doing with the rest? Please help me?
Unknown partitions can significantly reduce free space
I have a few ideas as to why this might be happening, but I would like to start by saying that you are doing the right thing by trying to format the stick as exFAT. Windows does not allow you to format a USB flash drive larger than 32GB as FAT32 because Windows . However, this does not mean that you cannot . If you take a third-party tool, such as EASEUS of Partition to Master Master , you can use it to format the flash drive in FAT32 size of 64 big blinds .
As always, this is only useful if you want this great Windows / Mac compatibility and don’t plan to place individual files larger than 4GB on the flash drive – the Achilles heel of FAT32.
(If this all sounds like nonsense to you, don’t worry. Storage devices can be formatted using different file systems, and they all have inherent strengths and weaknesses. Usually, you have nothing to worry about. Oh, save for the first time when you are formatting something, and usually this problem is more likely to affect you if you are trying to use the same storage device on two platforms.If you live in a Windows world, for example, just format the stick as NTFS and be done with it. )
However, there is no reason exFAT shouldn’t work, and I would usually stick with it if I were switching between Mac and Windows. You never know when you will be able to overcome this FAT32 limit, and it is better to have this compatibility ahead of time than wasting time copying files from disk, reformatting to exFAT and copying them all back.
And why the size of your drive is cut in half when formatting it as EXFAT, I feel that this is not a problem, it is inherent in EXFAT. In fact, I have a 64GB flash drive right in front of me, I just plugged it in and tried to reformat it as exFAT using a regular Windows tool.
I haven’t run into any issues with these settings, which makes me suspect that something else might be happening with your flash drive.
Try to make sure that you don’t accidentally use multiple partitions on your flash drive, which can ruin the amount of free space on your flash drive after formatting. To do this, click the Windows 10 Start button and type Computer Management. Launch this application and then click “Disk Management” under the “Storage” heading in the left sidebar. You should see a screen that looks something like this:
Find your removable flash drive in the list of storage devices below and make sure it has one partition like the image above for the “G:” drive, not two. In the latter case, right-click them, select Delete Volume, and then right-click that large chunk of space and select New Simple Volume. As part of this process, you will be prompted to format the volume with a specific file system. Select exFAT and you’re done.
I would do this process too, even if you’re looking at a single volume. Although I can’t imagine why you will only see one 32GB volume and nothing else, not even a chunk of unallocated space on a 64GB drive. I think this is where we start to “throw any solution to the problem.”
For this I could also use a third party tool (like the aforementioned EaseUS Partition Master ) for formatting instead of Windows. Perhaps some kind of operating system issue is causing havoc in the storage, which is something a third party application might be able to solve. However, I think the real reason for your problem is the extra section that you just don’t notice. Fix that and you should have a full 64GB of space that you can format as exFAT without any problems.