I'm having trouble transferring some large video files (around 35GB) from my laptop to external hard drives. I've tried both mine and my wife's drives, which have plenty of free space, but I keep getting a message saying "can't be copied because it is too large for the volume's format." Both drives are about ten years old. I believe this issue has to do with the file size restriction of 4GB. If I buy a new external hard drive, will this problem persist? Is there a specific format or setting I should look for?
3 Answers
Make sure to check your operating system too. If you're on Windows, NTFS should be perfectly fine for handling large files. For Mac, using HFS+ or APFS works as well.
The problem isn't the hard drive itself; it's likely because they're formatted with the FAT32 file system, which has a 4GB limit on file sizes. If you can, you might want to reformat them to NTFS, which can handle larger files, but remember that this will erase everything on the drives.
You're right! Your drives are probably set up as FAT32, causing the 4GB limit. Reformatting to NTFS or exFAT will let you transfer those big files, but keep in mind formatting will wipe the current data. A lot of newer drives come preformatted with NTFS or exFAT, so you should be good with those.
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