You also don’t want to have to edit them before transferring the raw files, just to get them down to size. This is a real pain when working in video, because you don’t want to let that dictate how long you shoot your video clips for. This will likely be because your drive is formatted as FAT32 and the largest file size you can transfer is 4gb. When working with large files like video and transferring to your usb pen or hard drive you may notice that certain files cannot be transferred on to it. The transfer rates are far too slow and drastically reduce your productivity.

Unfortunately for anybody who uses large files on a daily basis, this is not an option. This reduces a lot of the hassle currently created by having to carry hardware around with you. USB pens and external hard drives are in a way being replaced by cloud services like Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. Read below to find out which one is right for you.

You will want to change that to either the FAT32 or exFAT format. If you can’t get past this bit then your hard drive is formatted as NTFS or HFS+. You will likely not even care about what format it is using so long as it works.

This often is not a problem so long as your usb pen has been formatted to work on both a Mac and a PC, usually in a FAT32 format. Maybe you have a Mac at work and Windows laptop at home or vice versa and you want to take some work from one machine to another. If you have ever tried to work from both a Mac and PC then you have likely experienced the nightmare that is getting external drives to work on both machines properly.

But they are far from ideal for using on external drives and devices. The top two are going to be the ones used on your Mac and Windows machines by default. – exFAT (Works on Mac and PC with better file size restrictions) – FAT32 (Works on Mac and PC with 4gb file size limit) A very basic rundown of the format types available are – Formatting drives sounds very scary and difficult, but it is very simple and can take only a couple of minutes on a fresh drive. It is relatively easy to make a hard drive work between Mac and PC with no file limits.

Windows and mac compatible disk format