If you have a malfunctioning or corrupted USB drive, formatting it may be the best way to get it back to its original working state. Even if your drive is healthy, you may still want to format it to get rid of the contents there. This article looks at some ways you can format a USB drive on Windows. How to format a USB drive on a Windows PC Formatting a USB drive in Windows is normally very easy, here's how it is done. Step one Open Windows Explorer and simply right-click on the disk.

When you buy a USB flash drive, it comes preformatted for use on Window PCs. But will it work more efficiently if its reformatted in a Mac-native format? We just had to find out. I was in a local outlet store a while back, and they had 8 GB USB flash drives for just $1.50 each.

I should have bought all of them, but I only grabbed four. When I went back a few days later, none were left. Okay, the flash drives do look like the minions from Despicable Me 2, but for $1.50, they were a steal. (It’s also easy to remove the flash drives from the minions if the yellow guys embarrass you.) The flash drive itself appears to be sourced from PNY, a brand you’ll often find in stores.

Other than capacity and the fact that it’s a USB 2.0 device, I haven’t been able to find any more technical specifications. Round 1: PowerPC – Power Mac G5 For the first set of tests, I plugged the drive into the USB 2.0 port on the front of my 2.3 GHz and ran Xbench 1.3 under. For the second test, the flash drive was formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but with the partition still in Master Boot Record (MBR) format. For the third test, I repartitioned the drive using the APM option. Here are the results (higher numbers are better): Format: FAT Mac MBR APM GUID Disk Test 0.31 0.32 0.28 0.28 Sequential 10.18 9.73 9.07 8.47 Uncached Write, 4K blocks 7.05 6.54 5.85 5.53 Uncached Write, 256K blocks 6.68 6.71 6.35 5.83 Uncached Read, 4K blocks 14.86 13.55 12.54 11.47 Uncached Read, 256K blocks 29.22 28.44 30.33 30.43 Random 0.16 0.16 0.14 0.14 Uncached Write, 4K blocks 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.04 Uncached Write, 256K blocks 0.84 0.80 0.72 0.71 Uncached Read, 4K blocks 466.43 520.94 565.57 325.25 Uncached Read, 256K blocks 80.35 76.98 77.72 78.19 Overall, not a whole lot of difference.

Sequential reads and writes are a bit faster in general, with Mac format having a very slight advantage in two of the eight drive tests. I’d call it a wash.

Maximum read speed is 15.3 MB per second. That translates to 122.4 Mb per second, which is far, far below the 480 Mb per second bandwidth of USB 2.0. The implementation of USB on PowerPC Macs just doesn’t hold up compared with Intel-based hardware.

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Round 2: Intel – Core 2 Duo Mac mini The second set of tests were run on my 2.0 GHz with. The flash drive was plugged into a USB 2.0 port in my monitor, since accessing the rear of the Mac mini is quite difficult with my current setup.

Click to expand.Yes, NTFS or HFS+ or exFAT. (File Allocation Table) • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X. [*]Maximum file size: 4GB.

• Maximum volume size: 2TB (Windows NT File System) • Read/Write NTFS from native Windows. • Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X [*]To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X, here are some alternatives: • For Mac OS X 10.4 or later (32 or 64-bit), install (approx $20) (Best Choice for Lion) • For 32-bit Mac OS X, install (free) (does not work in 64-bit mode) • For 64-bit Snow Leopard, read this: • Some have reported problems using (approx $36). • Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard and Lion, but is not advisable, due to instability.

Adobe acrobat install failed on mac for lower version windows 7. • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS • Maximum file size: 16 TB • Maximum volume size: 256TB (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended) • Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X • Required for or or backups of Mac internal hard drive. [*]To Read/Write HFS+ from Windows, Install [*]To Read HFS+ (but not Write) from Windows, Install • Maximum file size: 8EiB • Maximum volume size: 8EiB (FAT64) • Supported in Mac OS X only in 10.6.5 or later.

• Not all Windows versions support exFAT. • • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support exFAT • Maximum file size: 16 EiB • Maximum volume size: 64 ZiB.

Yes, NTFS or HFS+ or exFAT. (File Allocation Table) • Read/Write FAT32 from both native Windows and native Mac OS X. [*]Maximum file size: 4GB.

• Maximum volume size: 2TB (Windows NT File System) • Read/Write NTFS from native Windows. • Read only NTFS from native Mac OS X [*]To Read/Write/Format NTFS from Mac OS X, here are some alternatives: • For Mac OS X 10.4 or later (32 or 64-bit), install (approx $20) (Best Choice for Lion) • For 32-bit Mac OS X, install (free) (does not work in 64-bit mode) • For 64-bit Snow Leopard, read this: • Some have reported problems using (approx $36). • Native NTFS support can be enabled in Snow Leopard and Lion, but is not advisable, due to instability. • AirPort Extreme (802.11n) and Time Capsule do not support NTFS • Maximum file size: 16 TB • Maximum volume size: 256TB (Hierarchical File System, a.k.a. Mac OS Extended) • Read/Write HFS+ from native Mac OS X • Required for or or backups of Mac internal hard drive.