Reformatting a SanDisk Ultra Fit USB 3.1 (Write-protected) Flash Drives

I recently bought several SanDisk Ultra Fit USB flash drives with the intent of distributing a 50GB VM that I had built. Much to my surprise when I plugged in the drive, I discovered the drive was formatted for FAT32. MAX FILE SIZE 4GB Unbelievable.

So began my journey to determine how to reformat my drive to a filesystem that accepts large files. I had been told that SanDisk ships all its 64GB and greater drives formatted to exFAT. Clearly that is not the case.

I did come across an interesting utility from HP called, appropriately enough, the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. (http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk-Storage-Format-Tool/3000-2094_4-10974082.html)

This would apparently allow me to format my drives to NTFS, which would support my large files. Good reviews. Seemed simple enough. When I ran it, I chose NTFS, clicked start, received an error about losing all the file contents, then, surprisingly, "Write-protected memory" with OK. Drat.

Looking a little further, what this did do though was remove any formatting from my drive so that it now appeared as RAW to Windows. When I clicked on the drive in Windows Explorer, Windows offered to format it. When I clicked on the "Format now" button, up popped the standard Windows format utility offering to format my drive in.... exFAT!

Excellent!

One button click and I was happily working with an exFAT drive that supported my 50GB file.

Why didn't SanDisk do this in the first place? Some mysteries will never be solved...