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."

Great

[Chih (1284150)]

I'm lazy, so it's good to know that the default setting is the best.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too lazy to even care.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm too lazy to even care.

Morla, is that you?

Re:Great

[geminidomino (614729)]

Wow... Neverending Story reference on Slashdot?

Way to make me feel old, asshole. ;)

Re:

[dimension6 (558538)]

...and I'm too lazy to write a reply to your post.

Re:Great

[Z00L00K (682162)]

What about ext2 and other filesystems then?

Installing the ext2 driver?

[tepples (727027)]

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 [fs-driver.org] 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.

You can partition flash drives

[Rix (54095)]

So you could just have a small partition holding the ext2 driver. Not really worth the effort for that, but it makes sense for things like truecrypt.

Re:

[RiotingPacifist (1228016)]

I use USB-pens to securly transfere my data from A -> B, gpg keys, documents, etc. Just because you use your USB-pens to spread viruses between windows pcs doesn't mean everybody does! I'd be quite interested to see ext2 vs reiserfs vs jfs vs fat.

Re:

[afidel (530433)]

If you don't need to write to the drive from XP then UDF is a possibility, it's about 3x faster than even FAT16 under Vista for small files and is supported by almost all current OS's (OSX 10.5, Linux 2.6.10+, Vista/Win7, AIX, etc) so eventually it shouldn't be a problem unless you need to use it with an embedded type device. If MS asks too much for exFAT I can see embedded players supporting UDF for large filesystems.

Re:

[Hucko (998827)]

Thus Microsoft has the perfect way to EOF XP... Support UDF, Microsoft! It will force people to upgrade! s/force/encourage

Re:Great

[mollymoo (202721)]

Define "best". The manufacturers will have selected FAT32 based on compatibility. The test shows that it's a good choice for performance too.

No JFFS2?

[garbletext (669861)]

Since interoperability is key in this context, anything besides FAT32 is hopelessly esoteric. So why not test the OSS solution as well?

Same applies to SSDs?

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

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.

Don't install your OS on FAT32...

[js_sebastian (946118)]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Permissions on XP are screwed and hurt more than they help. Being unable to delete/move some files even as Administrator in single user mode is bullshit.

Re:Don't install your OS on FAT32...

[repvik (96666)]

Google "unlocker". Very useful tool.

not so fast

[uberjoe (726765)]

FAT32 is great, unless you want to exceed the 4gb filesize limit. In which case you will need an alternative.

Re:

[neokushan (932374)]

You mean like exFAT? Which, as far as I'm aware, is basically just FAT64. I.e. it's got all the "benefits" of FAT32 without the filesize limit, probably at the cost of a bit of performance.

Re:

[mweather (1089505)]

The only benefit of FAT32 is compatibility. exFAT does not have that.

Re:

[neokushan (932374)]

I'd wager that it's more compatible than NTFS, though.
Still, it's not ideal and I agree with what you're saying.

Re:not so fast

[TemporalBeing (803363)]

exFAT has as much in common with FAT32 as does NTFS. Microsoft made a big change with a purposeful break from backwards compatibility. So while it may be a 64-bit compatible FAT implementation, it doesn't share anything with the older FAT file systems - even FAT32. So no, no more compatibility whatsoever than NTFS.

NTFS patten?

[jgtg32a (1173373)]

I thought NTFS had a patten on it which is why they used FAT32 instead.

Re:

[Chabo (880571)]

Do you mean "patent"?

Re:NTFS patten?

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

No, I think he meant "Patton". Having Patton on me is the last thing I'd want.

Re:NTFS patten?

[Joe Snipe (224958)]

He did, unfortunately there is a patten on that word.

Re:

[Chabo (880571)]

It only has a patent on it if you say it like the British do: "pay-tent". If you say it like a true American -- "pah-tent", then there's no law broken.

Re:NTFS patten?

[QuasiEvil (74356)]

You clearly mean treadmark. Which may have been left by a Patton, if he ran over your flash drive with his Jeep.

Re:

[jgtg32a (1173373)]

dammit.

Actually I did write Patton the first time, and then I changed it to patten.

Which is apparently a type of shoe.

Question

[oldspewey (1303305)]

If I format one of these with ReiserFS, am I still okay to take it through airport security?

Re:Question

[the_humeister (922869)]

Better question: Will the USB drive die faster with ReiserFS?

Re:Question

[Fred_A (10934)]

You might have trouble finding your files on ReiserFS.

Nah, you just have to dig around a bit in the directories. They're rarely very far from where you last saw them.

Size matters

[Thanshin (1188877)]

Did he run tests with 16GB files?

Re:Size matters

[pla (258480)]

Did he run tests with 16GB files?

FTA: "I've taken the 8gig and 4 gig drives, nine in total"


FTA: "I used a 350MB .AVI Video file for all testing.".


More importantly, he couldn't use a 16GB file, since FAT32 doesn't support single files over 4GB.

Re:Size matters

[coolsnowmen (695297)]

Did he run tests with 16GB files?

...
More importantly, he couldn't use a 16GB file, since
FAT32 doesn't support single files over 4GB.

And because 4GB drives don't support files over 4GB.

Re:

[TemporalBeing (803363)]

FAT32 doesn't support single files over 4GB.

True, but it will happily install (at least using the Linux Kernel's driver for it) on any size drive. I did that a few years ago for a backup drive that had to be accessible from Linux as well as Windows. Windows would only allow the FS to format to 32GB; while the Linux driver let it take up the whole drive (120GB? can't quite remember). The real funny thing was that Windows was happy to work with the drive afterwards and didn't complain whatsoever about the l

incomplete tests

[PatentMagus (1083289)]

I wish there were tests covering "typical user mishaps". Things like inopportune powerdowns and flash drive yanking. My anecdotal evidence is that I've never had issues with FAT32 but have had entire NTFS partitions become unreadable. It's just anecdote though. Now throw a truecrypt file into the mix ...

Re:

[corsec67 (627446)]

I have seen a couple of problems with FAT based flash drives.
What happened in both cases was that the files got "locked", and couldn't be deleted on OSX and Linux, but a fsck fixed the issue.

What about UFS?

[tchuladdiass (174342)]

Would one of the UFS variations be suitable for flash drives? And also better portability (almost all OS's support UFS by now). Would performance be better?

Read vs Write

[Hyppy (74366)]

It seems like the write time is the most variable out of all these. FAT32/NTFS/ExFAT scores for reading are all within a few % of each other.

I wonder what makes NTFS so slow for writes? The journaling alone reduces it that far?

Re:

[khellendros1984 (792761)]

Writing files in NTFS is apparently somewhat complex. I don't know *that* much about it, except the it uses B+ trees to store some of it's information (which are a little difficult to write), and that it took a *long* time before Linux had NTFS write capability. They were stuck on read-only for a long while.

Re:

[Hal_Porter (817932)]

I'd guess it's because NTFS sucks on a removable device. On Windows, by default, hot pluggable devices are mounted with write through caching. NTFS supports this but not very efficiently.

FAT32 and exFAT are simple enough that you can do safe access to a disk even without much write caching. FAT (and probably exFAT) actually defines a way to mark the volume as dirty in the first FAT entry at the start of each transaction where the FAT will be modified.

If someone pulls the drive right in the middle of writing

Important for me

[david.given (6740)]

I'm currently on site at a customer's office. I have one of their PCs and one of ours; legal restrictions mean I can't copy our source onto their machines or their source onto ours.

The solution to this is to put a copy of our source onto a USB stick and plug it into their machine, and then use a NTFS junction point (aka a symlink) to let their Windows-based build system see our source. This works very nicely, and I can just unplug the USB stick whenever I leave and the lawyers are happy.

However:

- I have to use NTFS. This is because the two machines are set to use different time zones, and frickin' FAT stores timestamps in the local time, which means that if I were to touch a file on one machine and the move the USB stick, the build system will go horribly wrong.

- I have 'optimise for performance' turned on; the non-Windows world calls this write caching. This boosts performance on NTFS *hugely*. I see no mention of this in the review. I now have to remember to unmount the stick on the Windows machine before pulling it, but it's worth it.

- You have to use the command line format.exe to format a removable drive as NTFS, because frickin' Windows doesn't let you do it from the GUI.

- If you turn NTFS compression on, you get a tiny bit more speed boost. But while Linux will read compressed NTFS files, it won't write them.

- You need to do something obscure with NTFS file permissions if you're going to move the stick between two Windows machines, because otherwise you'll be creating files on one machine you won't be allowed to edit on the other. Linux, of course, just ignores NTFS ACLs.

I have investigated the Windows ext2 driver, but while it does work reasonably well, it's still pretty clunky, and ext2 isn't much better than NTFS. What I'd really like is a decent Windows JFS or XFS driver --- NTFS is *so* last century.

You have to use the command line format.exe

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slashdotted

[Nimey (114278)]

Since the article is /.ed and I can't RTFA anyway, a question: I'm about to have a user start backing her files up to a 32GB USB stick. Probably no huge movie files. Should I format the stick as NTFS or exFAT (she's running Vista SP1)?

Re:

[Falstius (963333)]

According to the benchmarks, exFAT. If you trust it not to die a horrible death and to be readable anywhere else.

NTFS Permissions/Speed

[Ohio Calvinist (895750)]

I've always been under the impression that NTFS is inherently slower (though I do not know exactly "how much") because of the processing of ACLs/Audit events that do not take place under FAT32, and that other than for these "features" NTFS and FAT32 are very similar.

Filesystem for Slashdotters

[Bromskloss (750445)]

I don't care for compatibility with Windows. I use exclusively free *nixes and so does all my friends (otherwise they wouldn't be real friends, would they?). So having this richer buffet of file systems than just the two in the article, what should I choose? I have heard someone say that ext2 means less wear on the drive than ext3 (something with journaling?).

Re:

[D. Taylor (53947)]

Except if you'd even bothered to read the summary, you'd notice he did consider ExFAT. Whoops.

Re:Choose NTFS for the life of your drive

[_Splat (22170)]

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.