Sandisk Extreme 64 Gb dissapointment

Hi

I have just bought my 2nd Sandisk flash drive, a Sandisk Extreme 64 Gb SDCZ80-064G-FFP.

The drive came FAT32 preformated and as I was about to find out, the drive can’t be re-reformated with a FAT32 file system on a Windows machine and without extra hassel, CD boot etc.

I have only exFAT and NTFS as format options. Diskpart is also useless. Had I have known the FAT32 format limitation over 32 Gb I wouldn’t have bought the flash drive in the first place.

For this reason and for it is not detected as fixed drive (are all the new Sandisk drives set as removable?) I am sending the drive back. What a dissapointment.

The drive came FAT32 preformated

Actually it was formated as exFAT.  Anything over 32GB is formated as that per Microsoft standards.

are all the new Sandisk drives set as removable?

Yes.

Why do you need a drive set as fixed?

IIRC most sandisk USB drives are still coming in FAT32 even for 64+ capacities. the 32GB limitation is a Microsoft limitation. FAT32 actually supports partitions up to 2TB. 

If you need FAT32 you can download a free tool for windows called HP disk storage format tool. It will format the drive in FAT32. If you have a Mac you can use disk utility to format the drive in FAT32. Just the “MS DOS File type” file system.

That said if you do not have a particular need for FAT32 just use exFAT. It works with all new OS and does not have the 4GB single file limitation FAT32 has. 

Just bought a Sandisk 64GB memory stick to back up my files. When it got near to finishing up popped a flag saying 'The specified I/O operation on F: was not completed before the time-out period expired. Help.

Thank you.

37

What app were you using to backup your files that issued the ‘The specified I/O operation on F: was not completed before the time-out period expired.’ error msg?