Windows 10 commands to format USB flash drives with NTFS

Today's tip shows how to format a USB flash drive with NTFS using Command Prompt and PowerShell commands.

Command Prompt

This example shows how to "quick format" a memory stick mounted on D: drive to NTFS. The /V parameter assigns a volume label of "NTFS-USB", and /A specifies the standard NTFS cluster size of 4096 bytes.  

C:\> format D: /FS:NTFS /A:4096 /V:NTFS-USB /Q

Stephen Glasskeys

These commands return the D drive's file system information and NTFS cluster size:

C:\>fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo D: | find /n "File System Name"

C:\>fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo D: | find /n "Bytes Per Cluster"

Stephen Glasskeys

PowerShell

To perform same NTFS format operation in PowerShell, use this command:

PS C:\> Format-Volume -DriveLetter D -FileSystem NTFS -FORCE -NewFileSystemLabel NTFS-USB

Stephen Glasskeys

You can use the same commands to return drive information and pipe output through select-string to filter data:

PS C:\> fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo D: | select-string "file system name"

PS C:\> fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo D: | select-string "bytes per cluster"

This story, "Windows 10 commands to format USB flash drives with NTFS" was originally published by ITworld.