iPad Pro (2021) ISB-C flash drive

[csonni]

Just purchased a SanDisk 512 GB dual USB and USB-C flash drive for transferring files between my MBP and iPad Pro. It came formatted as FAT32 and other than larger file sizes, is there any other advantage to formatting EXFAT for my purposes?

 

[sparksd]

Just purchased a SanDisk 512 GB dual USB and USB-C flash drive for transferring files between my MBP and iPad Pro. It came formatted as FAT32 and other than larger file sizes, is there any other advantage to formatting EXFAT for my purposes?

A discussion on relative performance shows performance improvements with exFAT -

https://www.flexense.com/fat32_exfat_ntfs_usb3_performance_comparison.html

 

[csonni]

Thanks for that link. My 512 GB flash drive is only 494 GB. Not very nice of SanDisk.

 

[sparksd]

Thanks for that link. My 512 GB flash drive is only 494 GB. Not very nice of SanDisk.

True of all drives. See here for an explanation of measurements -

https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/179658-512gb-usb-memory-stick-only-showing-460gb.html

 

[jaytv111]

True of all drives. See here for an explanation of measurements -

https://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/179658-512gb-usb-memory-stick-only-showing-460gb.html

And even if they count bytes the same way and it should say 512 GB, you still lose space due to filesystem metadata.

 

[sparksd]

And even if they count bytes the same way and it should say 512 GB, you still lose space due to filesystem metadata.

Yep. Google "My 512GB flash drive is not 512GB" (or any other size) - this catches a lot of people by surprise.

 

[lungbutter]

And even if they count bytes the same way and it should say 512 GB, you still lose space due to filesystem metadata.

And that’s what you never really hear about. If a loss of that much space is an issue for you, if you’re able, maybe return it and get a larger drive? How much do you think you’ll need with good activity?