Can I use Lion Thumb Drive as normal USB pen drive?

Question

I have Thumb Drive OS X Lion, the question is:
Can I format this Thumb Drive and use if as a normal pen drive in Mac and windows PC?
If yes, how do i format the Thumb Drive?
thx! =)

Answer 1

Yes; as a Microsoft FAT-format volume.  It's probably already in that format as most external storage devices such as traditional hard disk drives, flash disks or key drives or USB sticks arrive that way, and OS X can use FAT directly.  Plug it in, and you're good to go. 
If you want to erase and start over with a particular storage device – to reformat the storage as FAT – then use Disk Utility, in the Applications > Utilities folder, and select the formatting option.
But if you're not going to use the storage on Windows (without having to reformat it back to FAT) and if want to use it to best advantage, I'd reformat Windows FAT or NTFS volumes over into the HFS+ volume structure; to reformat the storage using the native file system of OS X.
As for how to reformat as FAT...  From the Disk Utility help:
"You can use Disk Utility to format a disk to use with a Windows computer.
Notice: Formatting a disk erases all the files on it. Copy any files you want to save to another disk before formatting the disk.
Open Disk Utility, in the Utilities folder in Launchpad.
Select the disk you want to format for use with Windows computers.
Click Erase, and choose one of the following from the Format pop-up menu:
If the size of the disk is 32 GB or less, choose MS-DOS (FAT).
If the size of the disk is over 32 GB, choose ExFAT.
Type a name for the disk.
The name’s maximum length is 11 characters.
Click the Erase button, and then click Erase again."