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Anything wrong with formatting a USB stick in NTFS?

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Daleus:
I work in an environment that supports Macs as well as PCs.  The Macs can read NTFS, but can't write to it (natively - you can install drivers or whatnot), but they *can* read and write Fat32.

So, all of my work USB sticks are formatted Fat32.

SeraphimLabs:
All of my USB memory devices are formatted NTFS except where other devices like cameras do not support NTFS formatted memory.

The thing to do is go into the options for the device under device manager and disable caching. Although doing this causes a performance penalty, disabling caching makes it so that removing the device without first doing so in software is less likely to corrupt data.

MilesAhead:
Sometimes Eject or Safely Remove does not want to function.  Even though the stick will be shown as a removable drive, if you explicitly list the letter, Sync from SystemInternals should flush the data to disk.

I have USB 3.0 docks with caching enabled.  I have sync.exe hooked to F10 function key.  Before I'm going to shut off a dock, I hit F10 a few times to make sure the data is written. Sync works by simply locking the volume.  This triggers Windows to write all data in file buffers to the drive. Couldn't be much safer. I've been using Sync.exe through many flavors of Windows.

By default just running sync.exe at a command prompt flushes all fixed disks. To use with a USB key that has write caching disabled, just specify the drive letter, like
sync  F

without the ':'

The drives in my docks show as fixed disks. The fastest way to see if you have to specify the drive letter is just run sync.exe. It will report the letters of the drives flushed. If it shows your thumb, then no need to specify it.

It couldn't hurt. :)

wraith808:
^ I use Zentimo (used to be usb safely remove) for that.

MilesAhead:
^ 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.

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