External HDD "unable to transfer/hold large single files"

As the thread title says, I am having problems with my external HDD... It is a Buffalo DriveStation TurboUSB 500g (Product info: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822165067 and http://www.buffalotech.com/product [...] -turbousb/ )

This is my current problem.







To put it in words I guess, my E-HDD is plugged in through USB and will currently not take large single files that are about more than about 5gigs. Now when testing a file copy from my C: drive to my I: (E-HDD) drive as shown in those pictures there with a folder file with several files lets say around 200mb each and total leading up to 7-8gigs will copy over fine. This is a fairly new and unknown problem to me and I really don't know how else to explain it.

Any help at all to fix this conundrum would be really nice.

Wheelthrown is correct. Most externel hard drives are pre-formatted FAT32 to allow for read/write access to all operating systems (MacOS, Linux & Windows). However, one limiting factor to FAT32 is the 4GB file size limit. So, you'll definitely have to reformat the drive NTFS. This is not a problem, unless you intend to use it in a muti-OS environment, such as MacOS.

Of course, be sure to have a backup of all the data on the drive before reformatting it. The process will erase everything on the drive.

Good luck!
Luke

Thank you all for the help, sadly I did it the hard way and re-copied everything over to a different drive then reformatted it as NTFS before being able to try what SomeJoe recommended. But everything is all well and working now, and I'm able to copy large single files over now. I do know that the FAT32 is a obsolete file system when comparing it to the NTFS but I really had no ideal it came pre-formatted on most E-HDD. Once again thanks for the help.