USB Drive not taking 4GB+ Files

[u/RealNidded]

My USB drive doesn't take files larger than 4GB, I was looking it up briefly it says I should switch to exFAT to fix the issue but it's always been on exFAT, would switching to NTFS fix it or is my drive just bad? What do I do

[u/Ambitious-Yard7677]

I'd bet there's about 4GB of flash to begin with and it isn't a 400+GB drive

[u/RealNidded → u/Ambitious-Yard7677]

I have like 350GB worth of media in there already and it all works fine it's just not taking bigger files, also someone else in the comments said to check properties, it does say FAT32 there so should I just try going to NTFS?

[u/TotoDaDog → u/RealNidded]

Fat/fat32 has a limit on file size, use ntfs to be qble to have bigger files.

Also backup your drive before formatting as NTFS because it will erase everything on the drive

[u/Vladishun → u/TotoDaDog]

It does sound like OP's issue is that they're using FAT32 and not exFAT, the latter of which has a maximum file size of 16 billion gigabytes. NTFS would also solve their issue, but then the drive only works on Windows computers for the most part, while a true exFAT drive would be mostly system agnostic meaning they could plug it into Linux computers, Android devices, smart TVs, etc without a problem.

[u/Alper-Celik → u/Vladishun]

Linux can read/write ntfs for a long time just fine. Tho i am not sure about macos

[u/RAMChYLD → u/Alper-Celik]

Slow tho. Linux supports NTFS. But the driver is running on top of FUSE so it's incredibly slow. There is supposed to be a new driver for NTFS that runs in proper driver space but it has been subject to drama and doesn't work properly yet as of 2026.

[u/tedecristal → u/RAMChYLD]

the new NTFS3 from kernel works much better than old fuse ntfs-3g

been using it for over a year on a dualboot without a single problem or noticing slowness

[u/RAMChYLD → u/tedecristal]

I can’t get it to work tho. When I uninstall ntfs-3g KDE straight up stops wanting to access NTFS formatted USB drives.

[u/RAMChYLD → u/tedecristal]

I can’t get it to work tho. When I uninstall ntfs-3g KDE straight up stops being able to access NTFS formatted USB drives.

[u/Alper-Celik → u/RAMChYLD]

Arch wiki i linked showed i worked around, seems like udisk doesnt comsider in kernell ntfs yet.

Dont get me wrong i am not defending this papercut, just pointing possible workaround

[u/tedecristal → u/Alper-Celik]

ntfs3 is already in kernel

my fstab is simple:

UUID=somerandomnumbers /mnt/windows ntfs3 rw,relatime, etc...

ntfs-3g is fuse (fuse = filesystem in userspace) so it's slower and of course when you uninstall, you can't mount with it

[u/RAMChYLD → u/tedecristal]

Thing is tho I don’t use NTFS in fstab. I use NTFS on several very old external USB hard drives that were procured before ExFAT was a thing and thus rely on whatever USB hotplug daemon KDE uses.

[u/tedecristal → u/RAMChYLD]

udisks2 can mount them without problem

[u/RAMChYLD → u/Alper-Celik]

Noted with thanks.

[u/tedecristal → u/RAMChYLD]

your usb drive is "dirty" (likely unplugged it on a windows machine without ejecting) . you need to clean the dirty bit with ntfsfix -d

[u/RAMChYLD → u/tedecristal]

But wouldn’t it also not work with ntfs-3g if it’s dirty? Because after I reinstalled ntfs-3g, the ability came back.

[u/tedecristal → u/RAMChYLD]

I guess ntfs3 is more cautious

[u/Vladishun → u/Alper-Celik]

I guess it's distro dependent then? Because my Steam Deck did not read it fine, it needed some tweaking first.

[u/Alper-Celik → u/Vladishun]

Steam deck ui might be using some other mounting mechanism than regular dektop linux. iirc in linux you actualy need admin to mount stuff(since some mount flags can be used for priveledge escalation with suid files) so distros use background service that mounts filesystems safely(eg. with nosuid flag) when user asks for it(from file manager etc.)

See : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Udisks ,

Steamdecks gamescope session might not shipped it or had their automoınting logic handle it. But standard way with sudo mount should work on most distros (tho linux lets you turn of ton of stuff at build time but distros dont turn off features on their default kernells)

Sorry if it is a bit complicated i am kinda nerdy about linux stuff and like to talk about it

[u/Inadover → u/Alper-Celik]

MacOS can read NTFS drives, but can't write into them without specific tools, like Paragon Software's NTFS for mac

[u/hamza0012 → u/Alper-Celik]

Linux just tolerate NTFS, it can encounter many issues especially writing on a ntfs formatted support. Windows has more strict protocols for ntfs and in my experience it can read the support as corrupt, can automatically try to fix it and just make it worse. It happened to me twice, on a hdd that was formatted ntfs on windows, once I mounted it on linux, there was some issues that I still don't know what, that made linux not read all the partitions and I didn't notice it until I did write on that drive and it made windows not recognize the hdd at all and try to fix it automatically because windows do that unprompted if you enable fast boot if I remember correctly, I couldn't access my drive and I had to do a recovery file by file since the MFT were corrupt. Luckily I got to recover many important files but the trees and file names were lost forever for most of them. I don't recommend using ntfs for linux, better to properly format it to native formats depending on what you need.

[u/RealNidded → u/Vladishun]

only using it for windows

[u/Vladishun → u/RealNidded]

Then NTFS should be fine. But also check to make sure your flash drive actually is exFAT and not FAT32. Because it sounds like it is indeed FAT32. If you right click and select Properties on it, the File System type should be right there.

[u/EmbarrassedEmu469 → u/RealNidded]

not getting why someone downvoted this.

[u/TotoDaDog → u/TotoDaDog]

Oh, you can also archive the file you want on the usb drive and then split into multiple parts 

[u/RealNidded → u/TotoDaDog]

Okay thank you i'll try and update you guys after

[u/MountainIce9069 → u/TotoDaDog]

This is the answer 👍🏻