USB drives allow us to easily move files between different devices, which includes laptops, tablets, and even phones and some other devices. But as files pile up, it can sometimes become necessary to format your USB drive to clean it up. You may also need to format a hard drive for it to work with all the devices you want to use it with. If you're not sure how, we're here to help.

Why should you format a flash drive?

Free up space or improve compatibility

Formatting a flash drive, much like any hard drive, can be useful for a couple of reasons. Most commonly, you might want to do it to free up space on the drive and start fresh. When you format a drive, the entirety of its internal storage space will become available again. Technically, files aren't deleted with a simple format process, but they become invisible to the user and the space is marked as available, meaning new files will eventually overwrite that space.

Screenshot of File Explorer showing an error message when trying to copy a file larger than the target file system allows

Another potential reason to format a USB drive is to change its file system. Flash drives will typically use a file system based on FAT (file allocation table), because they offer the most widespread compatibility. There are generally three options here:

  • FAT
  • FAT32
  • exFAT

FAT and FAT32 are the most common and most compatible, especially with older operating systems, but they have file size limitations that can cause problems. These days, exFAT is probably the way to go, since it's much more capable but still widely compatible. It may not work on some older machines, but if you have a modern laptop and other devices, exFAT is ideal.

On Windows, there's also NTFS, a proprietary file system that's significantly more capable, on par with exFAT. NTFS is also used for internal drives on Windows PCs, but the big problem is that it's made for Windows, so you're going to have compatibility issues on other platforms.

How to format a USB drive in Windows 11

With that clarification out of the way, let's get into how you can format a USB drive on Windows 11. The process is actually very simple:

  1. Plug your USB drive into your PC.
  2. Open File Explorer and head to the This PC page on the navigation pane on the left.
    Screenshot of File Explorer with  the This PC section highlighted in the navigation pane
  3. Find the USB drive you just plugged in. Make sure you're selecting the right drive to avoid losing important data.
  4. Right-click the drive and click Format in the context menu.
    Screenshot of FIle Explorer showing a format option in the context menu
  5. The Format dialog will show up with a few options:
    Screenshot of File Explorer and the format drive dialog in Windows 11
    1. Capacity is the size of the drive, and it can't be changed.
    2. File system, as explained above, affects compatibility and also maximum file and partition sizes. exFAT is usually the best balance of compatibility and functionality.
    3. Allocation unit size changes the size of clusters of files, which means that a minimum amount of space will always be occupied by a file, even if the file itself is smaller than the size of the cluster. Nowadays, most files are too large for this to make a huge difference, so the default value should be good enough.
    4. Volume label is the name that's associated with the drive when you plug it into a device.
    5. Quick format is an option enabled by default to speed up the process. If you disable it, Windows will also check for bad sectors on the drive to assess the integrity of the files and potential risks to other files you store on it. This takes a lot longer, and it should only make sense for older drives, as newer ones shouldn't have bad sectors yet.
  6. Once you've selected the options you want, click Start then OK to confirm you want to delete all the data on the drive.

Once the process finishes, you'll have your flash drive fully free to store new files and use on any device you want. The process is quick and easy, and it really hasn't changed significantly in many years, so most of these steps apply to previous versions of Windows as well.

Final thoughts

There isn't much more to formatting a USB drive than this. Some third-party tools can offer formatting options that overwrite the data on the drive with empty data, making the files on it completely unrecoverable, but this should only be useful in very niche use cases. Otherwise, using the normal method will free up space and let you use your flash drive normally just fine.