memory stick won't accept video

LMiller7 said:

FAT32 was released in 1996. In 2022 a 4GB isn't particularly large but in 1996 it was huge. Many people didn't have hard drives that large. File systems and operating systems have compromises based on existing hardware. It is important for software to take advantage of later hardware but it is vital to run well on existing hardware. Otherwise you don't have a product but a research project.

In 1977 when FAT16 was released a file system that could support multi terabyte drives and files could have been developed. But it wouldn't have been practical. FAT16 was designed to be practical with the hardware of the day. Similarly for FAT32. Limiting file size to 4GB made many simplifications and optimizations possible. This was very important when designing for limited hardware. Windows 95 was designed for a minimum of 4MB RAM. NT required 16 MB but for many home users that was too expensive.

I suspect that when FAT32 was released in 1996 Microsoft did not expect it would still be in common use 25 years later. But sometimes things take on a life of their own far beyond what was intended. I think what keeps it in use is the large number of systems that support it. But NT did not support it until Windows 2000.

Ironically the advent of UEFI pcs has ben a driver in prolonging life of fat32.

Technically UEFI does not need fat32 to boot, but most pc vendors were lazy and designed hardware to use fat32 boot partitions. It is amazing how many pcs will not boot uefi without a fat32 partition!

Yeah, size of things have progressed, my first computer in '92 was an AMD 80386/40MHz with 4MB RAM and 120MB HDD running MS-DOS 5 with Windows 3.1 on top. First upgrade was to 8MB RAM and next was a 210MB HDD. My computer at work was an Intel 80286.

xb101353 said:

Thanks to all, but can anyone guess why all my memory sticks will accept a 4.35GB file when formatted with NTFS, but not when formatted with exFAT?

No idea - mine do.....



try formatting it again?

The exFAT format shouldn't be an issue with files larger than 4GB, hasn't been on my drives. There may be an issue with the drive itself, I recently saw a supposedly 2TB USB Thumb drive that would fail at 1TB even though it looked properly formatted but the owner said it was a good buy on the Internet, however it was unbranded, actual quality unknown.

xb101353 said:

Formatted it again with exFAT and now it's good. Thanks to all.

Excellent news.

xb101353 said:

BTW I read all the data on formats, but in summary - would you recommend exFAT or NTFS for large capacity memory sticks for use on both Windows and Mac?

I generally Format my USB's as NTFS as a matter of course.