Thank you for confirming what I have always said. Don’t reformat a new drive unless you absolutely positively have to, large file sizes being the only example IMO. I think you’ve gone as far as you can at this point. If you need 4GB files to fit you have exFAT and NTFS as your options but there is a down side.
You could try enabling the drive caching capability but you have to be very very certain you always Safely Remove any flash drive you use in the machine.
