"The disk in the destination drive is full. Insert a new disk to continue" although there is lots of free space

Recently I tried copying a file larger than 4gb, on my 8gb USB stick. I kept getting a message saying that "The disk in the destination drive is full", (although there was lots of space) so I tried reformatting the stick. Still, I got the error.

I checked and found out that the USB stick was formatted in FAT32, which I remembered limits files to 4gb. NTFS doesn't have this limitation so I tried formatting it to NTFS, unsuccesfully; there was no choice for NTFS when I right clicked and selected "format", nor there was when I tried through the Disk management.

Doing a bit of research, I learned that a disk can be optimized "for performance" or "for quick removal". By default USB drives are optimized "for quick removal" which limits them to FAT filesystems. In order to have the choice for NTFS format:

- right click the USB drive
- go to the "Hardware" tab
- find the disk in the list and double click it
- go to the "Policies" tab
- select "Optimize for performance"

Now you should be able to format as NTFS and copy files larger than 4gb!