Hi all
Is there any recommendation for best performace out of a USB? What should the USB be formatted in to use on a Windows box. FAT32? What about allocation units?
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If you attempt to store files larger than 4 GB on your pendrive, you should format the drive to NTFS. Otherwise, you should stay with FAT32 - NTFS is a journaling file system (more I/O, less lifetime :)).
To be honest, the idea of a flash drive wearing out due to NTFS is not likely.
Most flash chips these days, even NOR flash, are good for in the order of 100,000 write cycles per cell, which is a whole lot of writes.
However, the Formal USB 2.0 Device specification, states that the USB Connector itself needs only be good for "1,500 insertion/extraction cycles at a maximum rate of 200 cycles per hour."
Which rather suggests to me that you'll snap the end off your drive before the flash cells on it start to degrade.
However, if you decide to go NTFS you do need to be aware that security will quite possibly bite you when you try to access files on someone else's computer. It is easily fixed, if you know your way around the NTFS security tabs in the properties for the files, but you will need to have admin rights on the machine where you're fixing it up.
Format it as FAT32 and then
convertit from the command line using the/NoSecurityswitch. Or just format it in Vista--Vista automatically sets the permissions so that everyone has full access when you format a flash drive for NTFS, as long as the device reports itself as "removable" (this is true for most flash drives, in my experience) and not a hard drive.For portable hard drives, you'll still probably have to set the permissions manually, though, since the
converttrick doesn't work (you can't format anything bigger than 32GB as FAT32) and formatting it directly won't work either since these usually report themselves as hard disks (they show up as "local disk" in Explorer) and therefore Windows will honor permissions for it.you copy a whole directory of stuff onto it from an NTFS drive that has some permissions set within the subfolders, at which point there is a good chance that windows will copy the permissions along with the files, no matter how you created the volume in the first place.
All you need to do is forceibly set the perms on root to everyone again, and copy it to all subdirectories, but you need to notice that you have to before you're stuck with unaccessable files.
But yes, using the convert trick is definitely the easiest way to get the volume started.
I guess XP might copy permissions, but it seems that Vista keeps the permissions open regardless of where the files came from. That's been my experience, anyway.
if the drive is marked as removable, there are then no permissions used, but on portable hard drives, well this is different, particularly the problem arises when such drive is created while connected to the computer the normal way, being then normal hard drive with all the permissions being set.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Yes, I know. I already said that in my original post.