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.
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.
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?
In Windows 10 and standard Windows 11, the built-in Disk Management and command-line tools (diskpart) are hardcoded to only format FAT32 partitions up to 32GB. If the partition exceeds 32GB, these tools either don’t offer a FAT32 option or display the error message “The volume size is too big for FAT32.” This is a limitation of FAT32, not a problem with your SD card.
In the built-in Windows Disk Management graphical interface, the maximum size for a newly created FAT32 partition is 32GB. You can split your SD card into two separate 32GB partitions (both formatted as FAT32), but this cannot be combined into a single disk. To achieve a full 64GB of FAT32 space, you can use third-party software.
