In what format to format the USB flash drive?

USB flash drive, much more often calledjust a USB flash drive - it's a very convenient and popular way to store and transfer data. Typically, sold in stores flash drives, formatted in the file system FAT32. The explanation is simple: all operating systems support FAT32. If, for some reason, you need to reformat the flash drive again, you can decide in which format to format the flash drive: ext4, FAT32 or NTFS. In this review, we'll look at the shortcomings and dignities of each file system.

Ext4

This format is not supported by Windows,so you should use ext4 only if you have Linux on your computer, and you do not need to transfer data to Windows computers. In my opinion, the coincidence of these two conditions is not very frequent.

FAT32

The advantages of FAT32 are not onlycompatibility with all operating systems, but also a high data transfer rate for relatively small files. However, this file system does not work with files larger than 4Gb and loses its performance with high fragmentation of files, as well as with a large number of files in the directory. Another limitation: the FAT32 directory can not contain more than 65534 files (although how often do you have to deal with so many files?). In general, if in doubt, in what format to format the USB flash drive - choose FAT32.

NTFS

The NTFS file system provides enoughhigh performance when working with both large and small files, however, the average data transfer speed is lower than that of FAT32. The main advantage of NTFS is the high reliability of data storage from failures. Unfortunately, this system is not supported by Windows95, Windows98 and WindowsME.