Today, we will discuss the most faced problem which is, We cannot copy more than 4GB of data in our Pendrive irrespective The capacity of your external flash drive or SD card is large: 8GB, 16GB, or more. There is enough free space on the drive. You can copy the smaller files to the external drive just fine. Yet, when you attempt to copy a large file (4GB or larger) to the external drive, Windows gives you an error (such as There is not enough free space on the drive, or similar.) Does this sound familiar?
If you experience such a problem, most probably it’s caused by the fact that your external drive or card is formatted with the FAT32 file system. This type of file system has a built-in limitation on the size of the files that it may contain. Although the total size of the files that you can copy to a FAT32 drive could be as large as 2TB (or the physical capacity of the drive, whichever is smaller), the size of each individual file may not exceed 4GB.
This limitation may sound silly: why would anyone design a system that would not allow for the larger files? The problem is when the FAT32 file system was designed (that was back in the days of Windows 95), no one anticipated that we would have such large files in use today. Or, maybe the designers hoped that by the time such large files become common, the use of the FAT32 system would be replaced by the more modern systems.
In any case, how to solve the problem of copying the 4GB files? Easy: you need to replace the FAT32 file system on the drive with a more modern one, such as NTFS or exFAT. These newer file systems do not have the 4GB file size limitation! Scroll down this page for instructions on how to change the file system.
Which file system is better, NTFS, or exFAT?
They both are pretty good, but which one to choose depends on how else you are going to use the external drive or SD card.
The NTFS file system is supported by all modern versions of Windows (including such dinosaurs as Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT), and it also supports many other functions not supported by FAT32: file security, encryption, compression, etc. However, if you plan to use the external drive with non-Windows devices (such as an Android tablet or a Mac computer), it would not be recognized by such devices out of the box, and you would need to install additional software or tweak their settings quite a bit to make them work with the NTFS drives.
The exFAT system is not as advanced as NTFS (it does not support file permissions and access control, for example), but it has more support on the non-Windows platforms. For example, many Android phones and tablets, as well as the recent versions of macOS support exFAT devices pretty well.
How to change the drive from FAT32 to NTFS or exFAT..?
- Attach your external flash drive to the computer and just have a drink till your computer recognize it and assigns a new letter to it.
- Open the computer folder and locate your Thumb Drive.
- Take a backup of the data stored in it (if any), as the process will format all of your precious data in it.
- Now we are ready to rock right click on the drive and select the format option in it (a dialog box will appear)
- And in the box select the file system whichever you want (NTFS/exFAT).
- Select the 'Default Allocation Size' in the 'Allocation Unit Size' option to better be on the safer side.
- Now click on format and confirm any dialog box appears.
TADAAAA..!!
You successfully formated your drive in your desired file system.
Link for the explanation video on the same topic (in Hindi):
or
Just watch it here.
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