Can I Speed Up My Flash Drive by Reformatting It to NTFS?

--Peter Hess, Los Angeles, California

I was extremely skeptical when I first heard that reformatting a flash drive for NTFS would improve performance.

I was also extremely wrong.

After running some makeshift benchmarks, using both an older, slower flash drive and the fastest one I've got, I'm now a convert. In some tests, especially those involving copying a lot of little files to the flash drive, I saw improvements in the neighborhood of 70 percent. Things weren't that impressive with my other tests, but NTFS beat FAT in all of them, and usually by a significant margin.

But there's a downside: compatibility--that is, the lack of it. Any Windows 2000, XP, or Vista machine can read and write to an NTFS drive, but that's about it. Depending on the system's configuration, you might be able to use it on a Mac or a Linux machine, but how can you depend on the configuration of someone else's computer? And you can pretty much forget about Windows 98 and Windows Me. Meanwhile, just about every computer with a USB port can read a FAT or FAT32 drive.

Another problem: One reason for NTFS's faster speed is that it caches writes. But that's inherently dangerous for removable media. Unplugging a flash drive before you get the "safe to remove" message is more likely to cause a problem if that drive is formatted in NTFS.

If drive performance means more to you than cross-platform compatibility, here's how to make the change:

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click your flash drive and select Properties.

2. Click the Hardware tab and select your flash drive from the list of drives.

3. Click the Properties button.

4. In the resulting dialog box, click the Policies tab. Select Optimize for performance; click OK, and then OK again.

5. Right-click the flash drive again and select Format...

6. In the 'File system' drop-down menu, select NTFS, and then click Start.