Click the icon to launch GNOME disks Application. In Ubuntu, you can press the “Super” key and then type “Disks” in the search box. It’s safest to start with the USB drive not connected. TIED TOGETHER: How to list your computer’s devices from the Linux terminal Formatting with GNOME disks It’s easy to make a mistake on a computer with multiple drives.

Make sure you know what storage device you want to format.

Make sure you don’t care that anything and everything on the USB drive will be erased or Make sure you’ve copied anything you want to keep to another drive.

Writing a new file system to a USB drive will erase everything on it. We demonstrate a graphical method using GNOME disks as well as a terminal method. So as long as you have a recently patched and updated system, you’re good to go. At the time of writing, the current Linux kernel is 5.18. That makes it fast too.Īs long as you’re using a Linux kernel version 5.4 or higher, you can use exFAT just as easily as any other supported file system. It doesn’t have the disadvantages of FAT32, but neither does it carry the overheads and extra features of NTFS. That makes it a strong contender for best file system for USB drives that need to work with the big three operating systems. It is another Microsoft format and is compatible with macOS and – since kernel 5.4 – Linux. The exFAT file system overcomes this limitation. That was the hard upper limit of file size baked into FAT32. This was great until you tried to save a file that happened to be larger than 4GB. USB drives formatted to this Microsoft standard can be used interchangeably on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

The closest we had to an Esperanto of file storage formats was FAT32. Obviously using a Linux-only format isn’t going to give us what we need.

In order to enjoy maximum flexibility and being able to use them on both Windows or macOS and Linux, they must be formatted to work in all three operating systems. These are Linux specific file system formats. Linux hard drives are most commonly formatted with ext4, although other formats such as btrfs and ZFS are slowly gaining popularity. It’s easy with a USB drive-as long as it’s properly formatted. Sometimes Linux users need to exchange files with computers running other operating systems like Windows or macOS.

Linux how to format usb drive