New 32Gb USB thumb drive

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Just recently picked up a new USB 3.0 32Gb thumb drive from Micro-Center for $10 usd. Just plugged it in today and it's working fine. All my machines are in NTFS file format. The stick is in FAT. Should I reformat it to NTFS or will leaving it in FAT for file transfers between machines be ok?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I've always left them on FAT. The file system is like the chessboard, where the files are the chess pieces. The pieces don't much care about the chessboard.

USB thumb drives can be cranky to format to your liking on a Windows PC anyway--you may have to resort to a third party tool if you decide you don't want FAT.

Some hardware (car mp3 players for instance) pretty much demands FAT.

There may be some use case where you'd want NTFS, but I've never come across it.

 

[John Connor]

If you will place a file that is 2GB or larger on the drive you will have to format to NTFS. I have had no trouble formatting to NTFS.

I have seen those cheap 32 GB flash drives and I had a sense of skepticism on that drive lasting.

 

[corkyg]

If you want to make it bootable, leave it as FAT. Otherwise, do what ever you want.

 

[mvbighead]

As others have said... bootable = FAT; Files>2Gb = NTFS.

If you're going to move around any DVD ISOs, you're gonna want NTFS.

 

[vailr]

Fat32 can be bootable, at least when using MBR partitioning.
The exFat format would also allow >2Gb files, and is read & write compatible with OSX, but cannot be read by WinXP or (AFAIK) by Linux.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I got two of those. Loving 'em.

~120MB/sec reads from a thumb drive is scary, but in a good way.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I was at Micro Center the other day picking up a PS2 port capable Keyboard with Cherry MX Reds and I seen it and I thought what the hell. I don't have any USB 3.0 ports but again, what the hell.

Thanks for the info and helps people!

 

[jae]

Do you have a link to those USB3 flash drives?

Also, just format it with NTFS. You can still boot from it.

 

[inachu]

I've had experience formatting to a diff format then it works on that pc but not on another.
My advice would be to keep it as it is.

 

[ArisVer]

Not all devices boot on NTFS. Windows 8.1 installation on EFI needs to be formatted to FAT.

In short, if you only use it to transfer files it's better to format it to NTFS as it is a better file system and can transfer files larger than 2GB.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

man i think these things just went down in price again, the 32 gigs are around $10, the same price the 16's used to be