Sharing Thumb Drives

[pedzsan]

I honestly truly don’t know @#$% about DOS, NT, Windows — and then of course there is Linux but those guys usually have a head on their shoulders.

I recently noticed that macOS can read NTFS but it can’t format a new drive with NTFS (I’m also confused — it seems able to format a 4TB HDD with APFS but not a 2TB HDD… is that right?) And then there is FAT and exFAT and here is where I have no clue.

My question is what format for a smallish thumb driver is most likely going to work with someone using non-Mac OS?

 

[NoBoMac]

exFAT.

Re: APFS: should be no problem formatting 2TB APFS, as smaller drives work just fine under APFS. Eg. the SSDs that come in Macs, the couple of 512GB external SSDs I have formatted APFS, etc. For giggles, just formatted a 32GB thumb drive to APFS (that had a hiccup, but was able to deal with it: failed to create APFS container, but was able to convert the new partition to an APFS container in Disk Utility).

 

[pedzsan]

Did you do this from the GUI utility or via the command line? The option doesn’t come up for me…. Oh wait. Isn’t there some option somewhere to give me more options?

Update: View (in the window) Show All Devices

Thank you!

 

[Fishrrman]

For Mac only USB flashdrive -- HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format)

For sharing with PC -- exFAT