What Is the Default Format for USB Jump Drives?
Every storage device that you connect to your computer must be formatted before it will work correctly. This applies to hard disk drives, optical discs and USB jump drives, also called flash drives. Although jump drives are usually formatted by the factory, you can reformat the drive yourself when necessary.
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FAT file system
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USB drives are formatted much like the hard disk drive in an older computer, using the FAT file structure. FAT stands for File Allocation Table and is essentially a method for organizing data. Some flash drives are FAT16 and others are FAT32. The numbers refer to how bits of data are arranged in clusters. The higher the number, the more efficiently the drive can make use of available storage space.
FAT limitations
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As drive capacities have increased over the years, the FAT file structure has had difficulty keeping up. For example, FAT32 drives can handle up to 2 terrabytes (TB) of data. As of 2010, external hard drives with a 1 TB capacity are becoming increasingly common, and flash drives are not far behind. Once drives reach the limits of the FAT architecture, other file systems will have to be used, creating backward compatibility issues.
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NTFS
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NTFS, which stands for New Technology File System, is a formatting alternative for large drives. A flash drive comes from the manufacturer formatted to FAT16 or FAT32 specifications; however, you can reformat the drive to NTFS. Reformatting deletes all data on the drive and does not change the maximum amount of data it can hold, but changing the way your flash drive allocates files can improve the performance and efficiency of an already useful storage device.
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References
- Photo Credit usb flash drive image by Bosko Martinovic from Fotolia.com
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Comments
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fat is also universally readable by windows, mac, and linux. so, you can write all your photos off your ten year old windows pc then transfer the to your new I mac without any problem.
