If you are running Windows 7 or Windows 8, the process is really simple. If not, then do not add permissions or encrypt the files. If you want to secure your USB stick so that only your user account on your one computer can open the files, then using encryption or permissions is perfectly fine. Actually, this can be considered a downside or an upside depending on what you want to do. The other major downside is that if you encrypt your files on the USB drive or use any kind of file permissions, you will not be able to open them anywhere else. will most likely only be able to read FAT32. All other devices like cameras, smartphones, TVs, tablets, etc. Also, versions of Windows older than 2000 (except some versions of Windows NT) cannot read NTFS file systems, nor can most Linux systems until recently, so your compatibility goes down significantly. It will also reduce the life of your flash memory on USB drives because of the extra writes. Firstly, there is a lot more writes to the drive that are required when using NTFS and therefore access to the device will be slower.
However, there are also a few drawbacks to using NFTS on a USB drive. You can also set disk quotas and even create partitions! So formatting USB drives with NTFS has several advantages that would be good if you need to use some of these advanced features, i.e. Other benefits include the ability to compress files and therefore save space on your USB drive. NTFS is a journaling file system, which means that before an actual change is made to the data, it is first logged in a “journal” so that if something happens in the middle of writing data, the system can recover quickly and not need to be repaired. So if you want to format your 5 TB external hard drive as a single volume with FAT32, you wouldn’t be able to do it.įiles stored on FAT32 file systems also have a much higher chance of being corrupted as opposed to NTFS. FAT32 can only work with files up to 4G in size and volumes up to 2TB in size.
In terms of security, you can also encrypt files using the built-in encryption in Windows.Īnother major benefit of switching to NTFS is that you are no longer restricted to storing files less than 4GB in size on the device. For example, an NTFS file system lets you add Allow and Deny permissions to individual files and folders for specific Windows users, something you cannot do in the FAT file system. If you have more questions about formatting USB devices, please Contact Us.The advantages of enabling NTFS on removable storage devices are fairly enticing. So in a situation where you disconnect the USB while there is a write change taking place to the file system, there is a good chance you will corrupt the data. Meaning information can be writing to the flash drive at times in which you think the USB is idle. Also keep in mind that XP is a 15 year old operating system (at the time of this post) and Microsoft no longer supports the OS.Īs a closing note, the NTFS file system is not ideal for flash drives because it’s a dynamic file system.
If there is a Windows XP user out there, they can download the plugin from Microsoft to allow an XP operating system to see the exFAT device without wanting to format it.
Given that Mac computers are on the rise, your best option is to format the drive as exFAT. So you must decide to accommodate the Windows XP users or accommodate the Mac users. If you format it as exFAT all computers (Windows and Macs) will see the drive except for Windows XP. There are some plugins to help the Mac deal with NTFS but our experience proves those add-ins to be unstable. If you format as NTFS it works great on all Windows machines, but Macs can only read from the device, they cannot write to it.
So what if you have a file bigger than 4GBs? Well, you have to decide what is the lesser of two evils. Typically these large files are either video files or restore image files (for restoring a computer operating system from a single image file). If you have a single file bigger than 4GBs then you must use NTFS or exFAT. If a single file is larger than 2GBs you need to have the device as FAT32. The one huge limitation with FAT and FAT32 is the single file size limitation. These two formats are the best file system for removable drives like flash drives because they support the quick disconnect function and chances are very slim you will destroy the device or files if you unplug the USB without using the Eject function (in Windows) or Un-mount function (in Mac).