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Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?

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superboyac:
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...

tomos:
I have no idea/opinion myself

but there's this:
http://serverfault.com/questions/41674/flash-drives-should-be-formatted-ntfs

wraith808:
Nothing wrong with it- however there are some things that should be considered:
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).
2. There's also a lot more writing to the drive, which will reduce the life of the drive, and minimally reduce performance.
3. NTFS allows encryption- but be aware that if you do, you will not be able to open the files anywhere else.
4. There's also a space overhead for NTFS.  How much varies by where you look for the information, but it seems to be about 4%.

No breaking changes- but they are some things to be aware of.

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.

f0dder:
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 :-)

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