Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?

<< < (2/7) > >>

MerleOne:
All USB sticks come formatted as FAT.  But FAT can't store large multi-gigabyte files.  Does anyone see any problems with formatting a disk in NTFS?  I can't come up with a reason not to...
-superboyac (November 19, 2012, 12:36 PM)
--- End quote ---
you can always use an archiver like winrar that can split big files into chunks of 4GB max. And keep the FAT32 format.
-MerleOne (November 19, 2012, 02:09 PM)
--- End quote ---
(Obviously) not if you want to use the files directly, though - like large .WIM files for Windows installs, or HD .MKVs for playback on a media thingamajig :)

I've used NTFS-formatted pendrives for a while, and they work fine (as fine as those unrealiable POSs go, anyway). Only trouble I've run into is that NTFS is read-only on OSX, so you can't use it to get data from loose-wristed coworkers :-)
-f0dder (November 19, 2012, 02:16 PM)
--- End quote ---

Sure, but when clicking on the .rar file it will uncompress it to a temp folder and run it from there. Less efficient but it would still work - you still need winrar installed I think.

eleman:
1. You have to make sure that you eject safely.  The OS holds on to NTFS resources longer, and if you just remove it, the chances are high that you will corrupt data (write-caching).
-wraith808 (November 19, 2012, 12:52 PM)
--- End quote ---

Once you formatted the drive to use NTFS as file-system, you can revert to usual settings for flash drives and turn off write caching. That will minimize data corruption risks.

MilesAhead:
If the device comes formatted as FAT32 my advice is to do a slow format when formatting to NTFS. I don't remember seeing it stipulated anywhere that it's required.  But I've had USB that I changed from FAT32 and once it got past the point where I had written the drive in the past, in terms of disk space used, I started getting flaky behavior.  They performed as expected after a slow format as NTFS.

Also to cut down on disk accesses with NTFS you can disable last access. I do that on all my systems. I don't use databases or backup robots that need that setting.

Just google "fsutil disable last access" for the command line.

f0dder:
If the device comes formatted as FAT32 my advice is to do a slow format when formatting to NTFS. I don't remember seeing it stipulated anywhere that it's required.  But I've had USB that I changed from FAT32 and once it got past the point where I had used the drive in the past, I started getting flaky behavior.  They performed as expected after a slow format.-MilesAhead (November 19, 2012, 02:33 PM)
--- End quote ---
Quick and normal formats do exactly the same amount of formatting - which is simply to initialize a relatively modest amount of sectors with a blank filesystem. The "slow" additionally does a read across the entire partition to check if it's readable, but it doesn't do any kind of write, repair or sector-reallocation triggering (at least for harddrives, sector reallocation only happens on write)... so it sounds weird that a "slow" format helped you. I'd attribute it to general pendrive flakyness :)

MilesAhead:
I had a feeling you'd comment. All I can tell you is I've had problems with quick format both for bare drives and USB keys.  Long format fixed it up.  I don't really care why.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page