In this tutorial you will learn how to format an external drive in Windows 10. Witht he below mentioned step by step guide you can format the external drive on older versions of Windows i.e. Windows 7 and up. In this tutorial we will be using exFAT in place of FAT32 which is another filesystem that can be read by both windows and Mac. FAT32 has a maximum 4GB file size limit and on the other hand exFAT can work with files which are as large as 16EB (exabytes). In order to format the external drive you need to folllow these simple steps.
- 1st of all you need to connect the drive to your Windows PC.
- Now you need to open the Disk Management tool and it can be done by typing “diak format” or “disk management” in your Windows search or you can go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Create and format hard disk partitions.
- Now you need to right click on the external drive’s partition or the unallocated space which you want to format and select New Simple Volume…
- Now in the next step you are required to follow the wizard to select a volume size.
- IN the next step you are required to assigna drive letter.
- Now you need to select exFAT as the file system in the Format Partition screen.
- Now give the volume a new name.
- Now you need to click next and then click Finish.
- With these simple steps you will be able to format the drive as exFAT and you will also be able to use the drive on Windows.