USB Flash Drive Query

[BrightBlessings]

This maybe a silly question
Do flash drives need to be formated to NTFS or left as FAT and if so why?

Bright Blessings

 

[osholt]

This maybe a silly question
Do flash drives need to be formated to NTFS or left as FAT and if so why?

Bright Blessings

It depends on the flash drive.

Most flash drives are less than 8GBs in size, it is generally accepted that it is more efficient for drives less than 8GB to be formatted as either FAT32 or if less than 2GB, but not in all cases, FAT16.

While many flash drives under 8GBs in size would run perfectly fine if formatted as NTFS, There would be less usable space and generally your transfer speeds will suffer to a greater or lesser extent (this is from my own experience).

My advice to you is to leave the same file system on the flash drive as the manufacturer intended. They will have likely optimised it for such file system.

Another reason is cross platform interoperability. Macs by default can read and write FAT32/16 but can only read NTFS volumes.

I hope this is useful to you.

Oli

 

[BrightBlessings]

Thank you for that answer I will not fiddle with what is working as it should
Again Thank You
Bright Blessings

 

[osholt]

Thank you for that answer I will not fiddle with what is working as it should
Again Thank You
Bright Blessings

No problem

Oli