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Last post Author Topic: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?  (Read 29800 times)

f0dder

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #25 on: November 21, 2012, 10:10 AM »
But if you're stuck with an old BIOS, you might not be able to toggle the port to hotswap mode

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.
I don't think (esATA) hotswap reduces performance? - I'll have to investigate a bit, though :) Disabling write caching is a definite performance hit, though.

Is your dock USB3 or eSATA? I'd be surprised if an USB connector didn't show up as a removable device.
- carpe noctem

MilesAhead

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #26 on: November 21, 2012, 10:24 AM »
I was talking about sync.exe picking them up as fixed disks. Running it with no params flushes all fixed disks.  That's all. If it does not report flushing the drive letter for the usb when run with no params, you have to specify the drive letter to force it as in
sync F

as I stated earlier

The docks are SIIG USB 3.0.  WD Sata III drives freshly formatted show benchmarks at full speed. I think the fastest rated WD I have is the discontinued 640 GB 64 MB cache model. Sustained transfer is listed at 126 MB/s.  Sequential read/write freshly formatted is 130/138 MB/s Crystal Disk Mark. But CDM considers 1 million bytes a MB for some reason I can't fathom. After all, they have access to a computer to do the math.  :)  But they seem to prefer orders of magnitude.  In any case that comes close to what I'd expect.

I just got a cheap SSD on sale.  I'm using it in the dock for video mux.  Supposedly in a direct Sata III connection it should do 500 MB/s sequential. In the dock I'm getting 170/145 read/write.  But of course the beauty is in the random access.  I can use it for both video source and destination with no thrashing penalty. It's a Kingston. I think they phased it out.. reason for the sale.  But I got a good price.  $70 for 128 GB.  This machine has a plastic cage devised by Satan for the system HD. I saw the video of the tech doing R&R of the drive. Forget it!!  Besides, fast boot isn't the only thing in life. I get good use of the SSD muxing in the dock.  The SSD has the same controller as the other higher priced models. I think the memory is not rated to last as long. Eight years typical use as system disk.

I haven't tried it on W7 yet with the Trim notifications. I'm using it on a Vista machine. But the garbage collector works well enough for my purposes. I did a mux with audio only encode to another video container and I kept killing the job because I changed a setting in the middle and I thought it was picking up the temp file and resuming it was so fast!! I just watch the progress bar go across.

« Last Edit: November 21, 2012, 10:32 AM by MilesAhead »

MilesAhead

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #27 on: November 21, 2012, 11:18 AM »
In fact, now that I remember... sync.exe isn't picking up on the write caching. I had the caching disabled for a time and it still flushed them by default. It was last updated in 2006. It probably uses disk capacity to make assumptions.  But since it only uses volume lock API call on NT and later I have no qualms using it still. The SysInternals stuff always seemed pretty solid to me. :)

Tinman57

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #28 on: November 26, 2012, 06:50 PM »
  I came across this article tonight, perhaps it will shed a little more light on the subject:

What's the best file system for an external drive?
Cyberknight asked the Hard Drives, NAS Drives, Storage forum if a new flash drive should be formatted in FAT32 or NTFS.

http://www.pcworld.c...-external-drive.html

BearPup7

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #29 on: December 02, 2012, 01:58 PM »
There was a PCWorld Answer Line forum in recent days that talked about the drive writing problem with NTFS file systems on flash drives. Because of the excessive writing NTFS drives do, I reformatted my 16 Gb drives to FAT32, with 512 Kb allocation unit sizing. That takes care of the problem.

f0dder

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #30 on: December 03, 2012, 09:44 AM »
Does anybody have some hard numbers on how much extra write NTFS adds, and how much it actually matters - or is this the usual wishy-washy uninformed "oh, it has a journal, so it must be bad!" FUD? :)

The NTFS journalling is only done on filesystem metadata, not file data itself - if you're creating and deleting a zillion small files (which is where journal overhead might matter), you're already stressing the drive. And on the other hand, NTFS has optimizations like storing the content of very small files directly in the filesystem structures, where FAT needs to allocate separate blocks...

Flash drives tend to flake out far earlier than you hit the NAND cell max erase cycles anyway, so it's not something I'd personally worry about :-)
- carpe noctem

BearPup7

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #31 on: December 03, 2012, 01:56 PM »
 :( Pardon my screwup! The correct answer is format the drive in exFAT, then you can use 8 x 32Gb flash drives for ReadyBoost (the max allowed), or have the drive ready for very large files (the limit is 256Tb in size)! For drives 7Mb to 256Mb cluster size is 4K, for drives 256Mb to 32Gb its 32Kb and for drives 32 Gb to 256Tb its 128Kb.

superboyac

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Re: Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?
« Reply #32 on: December 03, 2012, 05:54 PM »
:( Pardon my screwup! The correct answer is format the drive in exFAT, then you can use 8 x 32Gb flash drives for ReadyBoost (the max allowed), or have the drive ready for very large files (the limit is 256Tb in size)! For drives 7Mb to 256Mb cluster size is 4K, for drives 256Mb to 32Gb its 32Kb and for drives 32 Gb to 256Tb its 128Kb.
Thanks!

SKA

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