Strange Problem with 8GB PNY Attache Mini USB Flash Drive

[Ironman]

Well, I just bought an 8GB PNY Attache Mini USB Flash Drive (I had bought USB's from them before never had a problem) and I today wanted to transfer a large amount of music that was on my old Windows XP desktop to my new Windows 7 laptop. So I gathered all the music files that I wanted transfer and compressed them into a .RAR file which was around 6.37 GB and when I went to transfer to my USB drive I received an error saying that the USB was full. Which it was clearly not, I even looked at drive through properties and it stated that I had almost 8 GB's free and I even tried transferring a smaller file which worked. So I decided to split my original 6 GB .RAR file into smaller 2GB pieces using HJ-Split and then I was able to transfer each piece on the flash drive with no problem. And when looked a drive diagnostics, it stated that I used 6.37 GB of space. My question is then is their a size limit on the file that you can transfer to a USB drive or is their some other issue? I was able to transfer my files but I had to split them into smaller files first, which prefer not to do all the time. If anyone can explain to me this quirk, it would be greatly appreciated.

[Loder]

Hi, I believe this may have been due to the fact that the FAT32 file system architecture supports a max file size of 4GB . While all modern windows Operating Systems use the NTFS file system, flash drives still use FAT32 for the most part. I am not positive on the exact reasoning for this, but I think it has something to do with the fact that NTFS's extra features would wear down a Flash-Based drive more quickly. Unfortunately, for the time being, splitting files maybe be the only option. You could also share the files over the network though, which would probably take a little longer, but it's really quite simple to do. Hope this helps!

[JJ 3000]

Or you could convert the drive to NTFS with the convert drive letter: /fs:ntfs command. Make sure you back up your data first.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHDu-w8dqvE

[Ironman]

Thanks guys that helped a lot.