USB Question

[Cid]

If I format my 4 gig USB drive to an ntfs file system (as opposed to FAT32), will I have problems plugging it into the ancient computers (Win 98) at the high school I teach at and accessing the files?

[Shoeberto]

Yes.

[ValiantKnight]

quite a bit.

I've heard of a program to let Win95/98 see/manipulate NTFS partitions, but in general speaking, without a special program to help you...

Older Operating systems can't read NTFS without serious help :)

NTFS is good and all, but yeah, no backward compatibility.

[Yamaneko]

Do you need to access files larger than 4 GiB?

[Cid]

Do you need to access files larger than 4 GiB?

No.

[o_O]

<a href="http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsWindows98.html">NTFS for Windows 98</a> is a driver set that I used to allow read access to my NTFS partitions a few years ago.
It's more stable than other products because it's a wrapper for the actual Win2k/XP NTFS filesystem driver.

If it's for the computers at school, you could probably talk the admin into installing it on all of them.

Of course, the other option is to just use FAT32. :p

[crono_logical]

I don't think NTFS is recommended for flash disks - there's a lot of write overhead accessing the filesystem compared to FAT32, which can considerably shorten the lifespan of the media. Unless you specifically need some feature of NTFS like security (which is pretty crap/pointless on removable media of that size anyway), it's best to stick to FAT32 :p

[Peegee]

Do you need to access files larger than 4 GiB?

No.

Usually this means it's okay to leave your disk formatted as fat32

[Cid]

Well, I bought <a href="http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820320002">this usb drive</a> and the transfer speeds were painfully slow. We're talking like 5-10 seconds to save a word document. Thought I might be able to speed things up by getting rid of the conversion process from FAT32 to NTFC, but it doesn't matter. It is just slow as hell.

If you have any clue why, let me know.

[ValiantKnight]

Not sure how slow, "slow as hell" is, however it is quite normal for a USB flash drive to experience slowness, at least in my experience.

Especially when transferring large numbers of small files rather than a single, large file. Something about how it writes the files takes a good bit longer, and it can take... 2minutes for 130 files, where it takes only 20 seconds for 1 file. However, both are the same size.

Perhaps you could try a large file and estimate or check the speed?

If you have, and its just the drive being slow in general, then I am not sure.
However I am just saying I thought mine was slow after also transfering word documents, three of them, and it taking around 15 seconds or more.

Then I transfered a large picture, and it performed that action in about 10 seconds.
The picture was more than 30 times the size of the word files.

I just accepted it as overhead processing and directory making slowness..., but I'm not sure, perhaps it is a problem.

[Shoeberto]

Are the ports you're plugging it into to transfer USB2.0?

[rubah]

probably not if they're running win 98.

[ValiantKnight]

USB 1.1 runs around 12Mbits, I think really old USB 1.1 might have been even slower
USB 2.0 runs around 480Mbits

Most flash drives I've seen when I was looking for mine ran between 8-25MB/sec reading and somewhere similar/much less than that writing.

So therefore, assuming its plugged into a USB 1.1 instead of a USB 2.0

1.5MB/sec instead of the advertised 8-25MB/sec

12Mbits become 1.5 MBytes

And mine seems to be a little faster on checking.. about 3-4 seconds for 6 html/word files.
However there is still some overhead when transferring each file in writing/reading. So if you have 200 small 8kb text files, which will be around 2mb. They will still take longer to transfer than a single 4mb music file.