Formatting flash drive

Hi. I just bought a kingmax 8gb u-drive, but i'm not sure wheter to format it in NTFS or FAT32. I searched through the forums and found an article that says that NTFS is faster for large files, but can prematurely kill the drive because it writes on it a lot, and that FAT32 is the slowest. Is it really that slow?

I benchmarked it with HD tune and got 26 MB/s average.

And what is the "Allocation unit size" in the format box? I let it set to 4096 kb. Is this OK?

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi.

If your only going to use it on your computer use NTFS , but if you are going to use it on a dvdplayer , xbox360, ps3 or similar use FAT32 as a lot of non-computer devices cannot use NTFS.

Regards

John.

 

FAT32 is probably your best overall choice. And the "Allocation unit size" you can just leave at default, like you did.

 

woah is this true? any link? comment? is it because of journaling?

the main reason you pick the alternative to FAT32 (like NTFS) is because FAT32 lack a feature where it kept track (log) all the things that happened on the volume. as such, there is increase chance in data loss when things like power failure and/or accidental disconnect. although i cant remember having lost a data on my Flash Drive.

set the Allocation size to Default.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=332023

 

Its due to the nature of flash drive storage... its flash based meaning at this day and age has a limited amout of writes that can be done to the card, and from my understanding NTFS does conduct more writes because of the file structure... it really depends on what your uses are... I usually just stick with NTFS cause flash drivers are cheap as hell these days and easy to backup

 

Ditto. There is absolutely no reason not to use NTFS these days.

 

The main reason I choose NTFS over FAT32, on my 8gb flash disk is that I give it to my friends alot, and we deal with alot of files over 3/4GB so they just wouldn't work on FAT32 without having to break the files into parts
[V TIME CONSUMING ]

 

Check out this nice guide that stewie made up about flash drives and their filesystem types. I personally formatted all my flash drives to NTFS. I use Linux mainly and so most of my partitions are EXT3, but ever since I found out that NTFS write support was mature in Linux I just changed all the devices I use(or might use in Windows) to NTFS.

 

Great guide man
It was an interesting read (+1)
Thanks for the link

 

That's not true. Unless you're transferring large files, I would highly recommend going with FAT32. You never know what kind of computer or device you might run into, and you don't want to end up not being able to use your flash drive with it.

 

Since I use my flash drive in a Windows only operating environment and use lots of large files, I use NTFS.

 

Considering that nearly every consumer grade computer today runs NTFS, I seriously doubt you're going to have problems with something as ubiquitous as a USB thumb drive.

 

You mean every consumer grade Windows computer today.

I'm not sure if OSX can read NTFS by default, but I know your car's and home's CD/DVD players won't.