Thumb drive file systems
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
If you could (and I think you could at some stage), it would be a waste of time, all the files will have permissions from the system that created it, making pretty much useless for its intended purpose :)
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Remember that often USB thumb drives are used in simpler devices, such as car audio, home theathers, game consoles, music players, printers and so on. Most of these devices only support FAT and FAT32, so NTFS may be a bad choice...
I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
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Christopher Duncan wrote:
USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
If you could (and I think you could at some stage), it would be a waste of time, all the files will have permissions from the system that created it, making pretty much useless for its intended purpose :)
xacc.ide - now with TabsToSpaces support
IronScheme - 1.0 beta 2 - out now!
((lambda (x) `((lambda (x) ,x) ',x)) '`((lambda (x) ,x) ',x)):doh: Yeah...
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
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Remember that often USB thumb drives are used in simpler devices, such as car audio, home theathers, game consoles, music players, printers and so on. Most of these devices only support FAT and FAT32, so NTFS may be a bad choice...
I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
And apparently in this case they're also used by simple people... :doh:
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
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Remember that often USB thumb drives are used in simpler devices, such as car audio, home theathers, game consoles, music players, printers and so on. Most of these devices only support FAT and FAT32, so NTFS may be a bad choice...
I see dead pixels Yes, even I am blogging now!
yeah. Most embedded devices use some sort of *nix; and NTFS write support's only a year or so old in mainstream distros.
Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Yes, they do. They support whatever filesystem you put on them. I have had fat32, ntfs, ext3 and reiserfs on the 2 to 5 usb drives I have owned. You can even have partitions the device if you want, although I am not sure what windows does with that. I believe they use fat32 as default because this is the most compatible filesystem with linux, windows and macintosh. Does windows now prevent you from formatting the drive as ntfs? If so grab sysrescuecd and formant it from that. http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page[^]
John
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
That odd. I formatted my new USB drive as NTFS from work, and use it at home as well. I know I didn't do anything fancy, as I just right-clicked->format.
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Hi, You're right that the GUI only gives the option of FAT and FAT32 but via the command prompt you can select NTFS as long as the drive is optimised for performance, not for quick removal. Set permissions to EVERYONE for maximum 'pluggability' or make them more restricted so the data is only accessible from certain accounts. It very dependent on how you intend to use the drives.
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>format g: /FS:NTFS
Insert new disk for drive G:
and press ENTER when ready...
The type of the file system is FAT32.
The new file system is NTFS.
Verifying 243M
Volume label (ENTER for none)? NTFS256
Creating file system structures.
Format complete.
248975 KB total disk space.
246218 KB are available.Easy! Alan.
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Hi, You're right that the GUI only gives the option of FAT and FAT32 but via the command prompt you can select NTFS as long as the drive is optimised for performance, not for quick removal. Set permissions to EVERYONE for maximum 'pluggability' or make them more restricted so the data is only accessible from certain accounts. It very dependent on how you intend to use the drives.
C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>format g: /FS:NTFS
Insert new disk for drive G:
and press ENTER when ready...
The type of the file system is FAT32.
The new file system is NTFS.
Verifying 243M
Volume label (ENTER for none)? NTFS256
Creating file system structures.
Format complete.
248975 KB total disk space.
246218 KB are available.Easy! Alan.
Excellent! And to think I forgot about the good old DOS prompt.
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
It's not necessarily wise to use NTFS on flash drives, because of the journalling in it, they generate significantly more I/O and usage on the drive potentially shortening its life. It can be done, but you first have to change the policy on the drive via the propertives context menu, then hardware tab, then properties for the flash drive, then policies. Selecting "Optimise for performance" (radio button) will enable you to format for NTFS, but the default (Optimize for quick removal) will only allow FAT/FAT32 support. Hope this helps Mike
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It's not necessarily wise to use NTFS on flash drives, because of the journalling in it, they generate significantly more I/O and usage on the drive potentially shortening its life. It can be done, but you first have to change the policy on the drive via the propertives context menu, then hardware tab, then properties for the flash drive, then policies. Selecting "Optimise for performance" (radio button) will enable you to format for NTFS, but the default (Optimize for quick removal) will only allow FAT/FAT32 support. Hope this helps Mike
Mike Diack wrote:
t's not necessarily wise to use NTFS on flash drives, because of the journalling in it, they generate significantly more I/O and usage on the drive potentially shortening its life.
Unlikely if the drive is larger than a few GB since every block has 100,000 to 1,000,000 writes most drives will last > 5 years now. The reason I mention size is the bigger the drive the less likely you are to write to every block 100,000 times since wear leveling will try to spread the writes out evenly.
John
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Excellent! And to think I forgot about the good old DOS prompt.
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
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I had to reformat my thumb drive last night as the file system was corrupted. My options were FAT and FAT32. I was appalled. USB thumb drives don't support NTFS?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
You could try exFat this is a new microsoft format designed for thumb drives and is more efficient than NTFS. Natively supported by Vista/Windows 7 and drivers can be obtained for XP.