What’s the best way to format USB sticks?

Formatting a USB stick, whether to prepare it for data, wipe its contents or fix problems, is a straightforward task: simply right-click its drive icon in File Explorer and click Format.

Either select ‘Quick format’ in the box that opens to speed up the process, or untick that option to perform a full format, which will scan your stick for bad sectors and overwrite its data.

However, confusion can arise when faced with the ‘File system’ menu— should you choose FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS? If you format your stick using FAT32, it will be compatible with a wide range of computers and devices, including smart TVs.

Due to limitations built into this file system, Windows only lets you use FAT32 to format drives and partitions of up to 32GB in size (some third-party tools can beat this restriction), and you can’t store individual files larger than 4GB.

In contrast, NTFS places no practical limits on the size of drives, partitions, and files, and offers extra features such as creating shadow copies for backup.

However, it’s only compatible with Windows and does have some restrictions, such as requiring Secure Boot to be disabled when you want to boot from an NTFSformatted drive. This has caused problems with the Windows 11 ISO file, which at 5GB is too large to copy to a FAT32 drive, but requires Secure Boot to run.

The brilliant free tool Rufus ( rufus.ie) offers a clever workaround, by installing Windows 11 from an NTFS drive without the need for Secure Booting.

That leaves exFAT (see screenshot), an updated version of FAT32 that removes most of that file system’s size limitations while retaining its compatibility with non-Windows devices. It’s fast and space-efficient, allowing you to use nearly every byte of available storage, so is the best choice for formatting USB sticks.

On older, smaller-capacity devices, exFAT may not be available, so you’ll need to use FAT32. The free program IM-Magic Partition Resizer Free ( www.

resize-c.com) will let you format USB sticks larger than 32GB as FAT32.