USB Pen Drives and large files?

Hi guys

I just bought myself a Kingston DataTraveler USB Pen Drive - 4gb in size.

I notice that it's formatted to FAT32 and I can't re-format it to NTFS in XP but I can in Vista.

I know that you can only transfer files up to a certain size when a drive is FAT32 (at least that's how I understand it).

Is this a problem and is there anyway around it?

Also why can I not use the USB pen drive for Readyboost - is there only a certain type of USB pen drive that can be used?

Thanks in advance for any help/advice

 

readyboost tests the drive to see if it will meet certain speed requirements for read/write, if it doesnt meet those requirements, vista wont use it as a readyboost drive. formatting it to ntfs would certainly help the speed test if you really want to use it as a readyboost drive.

as for your other question: http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/usb-flash-thumb-drive-ntfs-filesystem go there, let us know if it works

 

You can, you just need to go into the device's properties dialog and change a setting from "Optimise for quick removal" to "Optimise for performance" first.

 

Oh ok. Thanks guys. Much appreciated.

 

Only certain drives can be used for Readyboost. Normally, you'll know when you read the specs if you purchase from Newegg. I don't know about other retailers, though. How much RAM do you currently have installed? I've read that Readyboost really doesn't make a difference if you have more that 1GB installed, so you may not be missing out on much.

 

That's correct—the maximum size of a file on a FAT32 partition is 4 GB. There is no way around this—you have to use another filesystem if you want to store larger files. What exactly are you trying to store that's so large? Perhaps you could use WinRAR to create a compressed archive of the file that's split into multiple smaller files? Note that this would be impractical if you're going to be regularly accessing the file.

 

Nothing bigger than 4gb. I didn't realise that was where the limit is set. I guess seeing as the pen drive is 4gb I don't need to worry. I though the limit was something around 2gb...

I have a Dawn of War Soulstorm mod folder that is 2.2gb in size before using winrar or anything similar that I need to transfer between laptops, just wondering if I'd be able to transfer it the pen drive wholesale rather than compressing, thinking of saving time you see...

 

ofcourse you could. just drag and drop the folder