Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?

<< < (5/7) > >>

superboyac:
^ I use Zentimo (used to be usb safely remove) for that.
-wraith808 (November 20, 2012, 06:07 PM)
--- End quote ---

I got a free copy of Safely Remove. It was totally inconsistent on my machines. Basically a waste of time hitting the button.

Plus you don't want to "safely remove" hardware that is seen as a fixed drive, like the bare drives in my docks. Flush buffer kill power does it. Sync.exe works on everything, even Win9x. I've been using it since 9x days.

-MilesAhead (November 20, 2012, 06:40 PM)
--- End quote ---
Really?  What was inconsistent?  I've been using it for a couple of years and have had no problems, but maybe I'm doing something dangerous?  I've used it to eject usb drives and esata drives in docks.

MilesAhead:
Inconsistent meaning I invoked it again and again and it almost never told me the drive could now be removed. I liked the eye candy. I wouldn't have stopped using it if it worked for me.

Like many things if it works for you it's great. If not it's a lemon.

SKA:
I found USB Safely Remove to be much better (stable) than Zentimo on Vista Business 32-bit, Zentimo hangs with errors , but USBSR worked smoothly since last 2 years, on same flash drives/external drives(USB 2.0/3.0) .

Hard drives (2.5 or 3.5") in USB enclosures are far more reliable than flash/pen drives/"sticks", esp. if the former (external hard drives) have their own power supply(ac adapter etc)

My guess: All pendrives (even 16/32/64/128/256GB versions) are not so reliable as they rely on USB socket(2.0/3.0) for power,so a (heat) glitch in motherboard (whether desktop or laptop) could affect your data. So one is forced to have multiple devices for backup, of which I recommend at least one external powered drive.

exFAT file system(Microsoft): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955704
-Supports volumes larger than 32 GB, Theoretical max volume size 64 ZB,
  recommended max volume size is 512 TB.
-Supports files larger than 4 GB, Theoretical max file size 64 ZB, recommended max file size 512 TB.

some more links on exFAT:
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/07/use-the-exfat-file-system-and-never-format-your-external-drive-again/

http://www.mactalk.com.au/11/98585-exfat-not-compatible-between-windows-7-mac.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_5878184_format-exfat-formatting-windows-7.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation-setup/7627-exfat-format.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/241494-problem-exfat-usb-flash-drive.html

rgds
Ska

f0dder:
The drives in my docks show as fixed disks.-MilesAhead (November 20, 2012, 05:24 PM)
--- End quote ---
For an USB dock? What?!

I've seen that happen with eSata, but only if the BIOS hasn't configured the particular port used for hotswap... while you can do some hotswapping in that scenario, it's kinda flaky and dangerous. But if you're stuck with an old BIOS, you might not be able to toggle the port to hotswap mode :(

As for exFAT, I wouldn't use it unless for a specific device... devices that only support FAT don't support exFAT, so in that case you might as well use the (much) more robust NTFS.

MilesAhead:
But if you're stuck with an old BIOS, you might not be able to toggle the port to hotswap mode
--- End quote ---

Write caching may be disabled. But since I'm running Sata III bare drives why would I want to take a performance hit?  I have battery backup on the docks.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page