Forum Discussion
shikarpur
Jun 24, 2025Iron Contributor
The best fat32 formatter for windows 10/11?
No FAT32 option when formatting my USB drive from windows 10 and windows 11 file explorer. It is a 64GB SanDisk USB 3.0 flash drive and currently there is only one NTFS partition on it. I need to for...
AnthonyGarcia
Jun 24, 2025Iron Contributor
When it comes to using Windows’ built-in tools like File Explorer or Command Prompt to format drives as FAT32, there are a few downsides I’ve personally experienced or heard about FAT32 formatter:
- File Explorer only lets you format drives 32GB or smaller in FAT32. So, if you’ve got a big drive (say, 64GB or more), you’re out of luck with just the default options. You’d need a third-party tool for bigger drives.
- The built-in formatter isn’t super flexible. For example, it doesn’t give you a lot of options for customizing cluster size or other formatting parameters. If you’re into tweaking stuff, that’s a bit of a pain.
- Using format /FS:FAT32 via Command Prompt can sometimes be finicky. It might hang or throw errors on larger drives, or it might just not work depending on your Windows version. I’ve had times where it refuses to format a drive larger than 32GB, even if technically possible with third-party tools.
- Formatting large drives with the built-in tools can take a while, and sometimes it fails midway or leaves the drive in a weird state. Not the most reliable for bigger or problematic drives.
Windows’ built-in options are decent for small drives but pretty limited and sometimes flaky for larger ones. If you’re serious about FAT32 formatting on bigger drives, go third-party.