Slashdot Mirror
USB Flash Drive Comparison Part 2 — FAT32 Vs. NTFS
Dampeal writes "Ok, a little while back I ran a somewhat large USB Flash Drive Comparison with 21 drives compared, today I got part two of that comparison. I've taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total, and formatted them FAT32, NTFS and ExFAT and ran all of the tests over again for a comparison of how the file systems work on the drives." Good news — after some exhaustively graphed testing scenarios, the author comes to a nice conclusion for lazy people, writing "[I]n my opinion the all around best choice is FAT32, or the default for most all USB drives out there today, it seems to give us the best average performance overall."
I'm lazy, so it's good to know that the default setting is the best.
For best results, avoid doing stupid things.
FAT32 is great, unless you want to exceed the 4gb filesize limit. In which case you will need an alternative.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
The question about filesystems has come up a few times over on the Dell Mini forums. Basically the question is which is better to use on machines with SSDs? If you're not dealing with >4GB files, several people have suggested that you're better off formatting the drive as FAT32. I'll need to take a better look at this article when I get a chance, but it seems to be suggesting the same thing.
FAT32 is fine for a USB stick, but you shouldn't install an OS on it. The problem is that FAT32 has no concept of file ownership. So your operating system will be unable to restrict access to files based on the user, which is one of the building blocks of security on any modern OS. This way, any (malicious) process running on the system can overwrite critical system files to do arbitrary damage.
Even if you run windows XP as adminstrator, not all processes on your system run as administrator so you will still be (slightly) decreasing security by having it on a FAT32 filesystem.
Did he run tests with 16GB files?
.AVI Video file for all testing.".
FTA: "I've taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total"
FTA: "I used a 350MB
More importantly, he couldn't use a 16GB file, since FAT32 doesn't support single files over 4GB.
What about ext2 and other filesystems then?
Ninety percent of desktop PCs run Windows, and for interchange among the public, file systems that most PCs running Windows cannot read aren't worth testing. If you format your USB drive as ext2 and carry it to someone else's PC, you'll need to 1. carry a CD or a second USB drive with the ext2 driver and 2. get admin rights in order to install it on someone else's PC. It'd be like the Windows 9x days, when you needed to carry a floppy disk with the USB mass storage class driver whenever you used someone else's computer.
Select the usb drive right click/hardware/policies select optimize for performance and the GUI formatter will now have NTFS as an option.
After formatting you can reset the policy as needed.
I personally turn optimize for performance off on USB drives as many times explorer or some other program will lock the drive preventing a safe removal.
Since many folks use their usb devices as backup media, it should be noted since fat32 has a file size limitation of about 4gb, fat32 is not an option if you wish to use MS Backup utility to create backup images larger than that.
Yes, Windows has a built in artificial limitation for formatting FAT32 because they want you to use NTFS. Format with Linux instead for 32GB+.
Flash drives have a flash translation layer that makes the flash look like a regular disk despite having special properties. This layer handles the wear-leveling, garbage collection, and bad block detection so the standard filesystem (that was designed for magnetic disks, probably) doesn't have to consider them. Regardless of the filesystem used, the wear of the device should be related to the total amount of data written, not the location of the data.
-Splat