USB Drives are handy these days be it Thumb Drives or External Hard Disks. You can easily find a 4GB drive for less than $5. But the only thing that we really care for is, “speed”. If you are looking for a way to optimize speed for your USB Drives without actually upgrading to USB 3.0 (yes we now have USB 3.0 at 4.8 Gbps transfer rates). The best solutions available for this is to convert the File System to NTFS.
Though Windows Vista and Windows 7 allow you to format a drive with NTFS with ease, Windows XP only allows you to format with FAT and FAT32. However this simple trick you let can format with NTFS in Windows XP if you want to and access it at better speed (or probably compression too if you want).
Open Device manager (Right Click on My Computer Icon and Properties, Click on Hardware Tab and then device manager and open it.)
Search for Disk Drives in the Tree and Select your USB Drives Properties (Right Click, Do i need to say ?)
Under Policies Tab select Optimize for performance. Now this will allow you to format USB Drives with NTFS file system.
Now to format your USB drive, right-click the drive and select format. You will find the NTFS option there now.
There is a lot of advantage in using NTFS over FAT File System if you are using these drives for connecting them to computers. The drawback is other devices (mp3 players, DVD players) may or may not support.
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Hi there. I see that you know a lot about USB drives. I have a basic question. If I have a large file on a MAC computer and want to save it to a thumb drive to be used on a PC, is this possible and what do you recommend in terms of hardware and settings?
Hello Lynn,
I don’t find a problem here if your file is industry standard like JPEGs, GIFs etc because those files can run from any platform without any problem. For other files you may need to convert them into Windows file format to make them work.
Regarding transferring of files, the NTFS system is not compatible with MAC OS X so make sure your thumb drive is formatted with the FAT system.
To make things simple there is also something called MacDrive which you can use.