Flash USB Memory - Fat32/NTFS?

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Proto

Legendary Member
Buying some stuff on eBuyer yesterday when I stumbled on a huge capacity (and cheap) memory stick, and thought it might be useful as a back up for the work back up drive (Western Digital Passport portable hard drive).


Using MS Backup (part of Windows XP), the file size is about 20Gb. So I was not best pleased when the memory stick declared itself full at only 4Gb, which I understand is the limit for FAT32.

Properties indeed shows the memory to be FAT32.

So, two questions:

1) Can you reformat memory sticks to NTFS? I fear not.

2) Can you buy big capacity NTFS memory sticks?

Grrrrrrrrrr!!
angry.gif
 

HJ

Cycling in Scotland
Location
Auld Reekie
Yes and Yes
 
NTFS will wear out your flash drive more quickly than FAT32 due to they way it writes and updates the data on the drive, but the advantage of NTFS is that it doesn't have the size limitation of FAT32....


...which is why they created exFAT - all of the advantages of FAT32 (Speed, low resource use) without the size limitations.

It was released with Vista SP1, but there are addon drivers for XP to use it.
Obviously, Windows 7 and Linux does it out of the box.
 

twowheelsgood

Senior Member
Buying some stuff on eBuyer yesterday when I stumbled on a huge capacity (and cheap) memory stick, and thought it might be useful as a back up for the work back up drive (Western Digital Passport portable hard drive).


Using MS Backup (part of Windows XP), the file size is about 20Gb. So I was not best pleased when the memory stick declared itself full at only 4Gb, which I understand is the limit for FAT32.

Properties indeed shows the memory to be FAT32.

So, two questions:

1) Can you reformat memory sticks to NTFS? I fear not.

2) Can you buy big capacity NTFS memory sticks?

Grrrrrrrrrr!!
angry.gif

FAT32 can support up to 8 TB (FAT tops out at 2GB). If you can't reformat a USB device to NTFS try right clicking on a disk and properties

under hardware and properties again and policies and select "optimize for performance" and then format.
 
OP
OP
Proto

Proto

Legendary Member
FAT32 can support up to 8 TB (FAT tops out at 2GB). If you can't reformat a USB device to NTFS try right clicking on a disk and properties

under hardware and properties again and policies and select "optimize for performance" and then format.

Thanks for that.

Over the weekend, using my XP desktop, I managed to format the device to NTFS, and all seemed okay. Then, since my l laptop is on Windows 7, I thought I'd have a go at exFAT32. That was pretyy easy too, and seemed to work.

So last night, when I went to back up to the flash drive, my work XP machine, although it would 'see' the drive, it wouldn't recognise it as a 'removable device' for the back up routine. Grrrrrr again. So, back to NTFS format and all worked fine. I think it was 18Gb in the end.
 
Thanks for that.

Over the weekend, using my XP desktop, I managed to format the device to NTFS, and all seemed okay. Then, since my l laptop is on Windows 7, I thought I'd have a go at exFAT32. That was pretyy easy too, and seemed to work.

So last night, when I went to back up to the flash drive, my work XP machine, although it would 'see' the drive, it wouldn't recognise it as a 'removable device' for the back up routine. Grrrrrr again. So, back to NTFS format and all worked fine. I think it was 18Gb in the end.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, if you want to make XP with exFAT you have to install a Microsoft HotFix (KB955704), as it was developed way after XP was made...

linky
 
BUT the max filesize FAT32 can have is 4gb, so not suitable for >4gb movie files or dvd images etc.

This may have been the cause of the message you saw saying it was "full" if you were trying to save a large file to the stick. I use NTFS on my 16GB usb stick.
 
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