USB flash drives

USB flash drives are one of the coolest and most useful new pieces of technology to show up in the last decade if you ask me. Now you can easily carry gigabytes worth of data on a fast read/write format. But one of the most annoying thing to me is Windows will not let you format USB flash drives with the NTFS format. Hello Microsoft, it's 2010, we want NTFS not some flavor of FAT. I personally enjoy having NTFS security on my files on a device which is very easy to lose and someone else find. The good news is there is a way to format USB flash drives with NTFS and here's how you do it.

1. The first option is to use a different version of Windows. Not all versions of Windows enforce this restriction. WinXP does but Win2K does not. I'm not sure about Vista or Win7. But if you have easy access to a different version of Windows give that a try.

2. If that doesn't work then you can change XP to allow NTFS. Open up Device Manager. In the tree look for the "Disk drives" section. Under the disk drives find the USB flash drive in question, right click and select Properties. Click on the Policies tab. Finally change the setting to "Optimize for performance." You can now format the drive using NTFS using WinXP.

I should point out that Microsoft made it difficult to format USB flash drives with NTFS for a reason. The NTFS files system has a lot more read/write operations that FAT. Even if you view files and don't save them it does update info in NTFS. In fact, I believe that even if you have an Explorer Window open on that drive and do nothing, it will still occasionally write to NTFS. And since USB flash drives are a limited number of write cycles before they fail your USB flash drive will last longer with FAT than NTFS. But the way I look at it, these drives capacities are growing so fast that the drive will become obsolete size-wise before the drive fails.