How To: Format USB as NTFS File System

Format USB Stick as NTFS File System

Flash drives are getting very large in size these days, the new SuperSpeed USB 3.0 sticks are getting over 256GB capacity.  With these larger sticks, the option to format the device as a NTFS file system is available, but what about the smaller USB sticks?

By default, any USB stick under 4GBs in capacity will not have the Format USB as NTFS file system option, but we can fix that.

Here is the How To: Format USB sticks as NTFS:

Click Start > My Computer > Right click on the drive letter for the USB stick and select Properties.

Now, click the Hardware tab of the Properties pop-up window and select the drive letter of which you’d like to change.  In this case, it’s drive letter F shown as “Simple Flash Disk 2.0 USB Device“  From here click the Properties button.

The next step is click the Policies tab and set the device to “Optimize for Performance”

The final step is going back to Windows Explorer and select the USB stick you want to format [in this case drive letter F], Right click and select Format and now the option for NTFS is available.

This How To Format a USB stick as NTFS is pulled from an earlier post.