Nine USB flash drives compared in file system showdown
By Donald Melanson 
posted Jan 27th 2009 3:07PM
posted Jan 27th 2009 3:07PM
Kristofer Brozio already spent more time with more flash drives than most would dare to with his last USB drive round-up, but he's now come back for another go 'round, and this time he's even gone so far as to compare their performance with different file systems. To make things a bit more manageable, he pared things down to nine drives from the initial group of 21, and formatted and reformatted each with FAT32, NTFS and ExFAT file systems. As with last time, he found that the OCZ and Super Talent drives proved to be the best overall performers and, while ExFAT did come out on top in a number of benchmarks, he still recommends FAT32 due to its greater compatibility and still decent performance. Still need a bit more convincing? Then hit up the link below for the graph explosion.
I wish I had seen this before getting another drive to use as readyboost..... dang it interwebs!!!
You actually have friends? And they borrow stuff from you? I somehow find that hard to believe.
But doesn't FAT32 have a file size limit? It may be very compatible, but at those sizes, I'm going to be using a flash drive to carry around movie files and other large programs. I want to be able to have file sizes above 4 GB (or whatever it is, i had to reformat an external hard drive cuz it was formatted in FAT32, and i was trying to store videos on it).
It's a bummer that the PS3 doesn't support NTFS... I reformatted a 1Tb FAT32 HDD to NTFS, only to find this out later. D'OH!
Did everyone see how much better exFAT performed? I'm surprised I don't see this format mentioned more often.
I use SD card(s) and USB SD readers.
Unfortunately, that area isn't as well developed...
The supertalent pico has a lot of reports of fail rates. i have a tiny 2GB kingmax drive that's been solid for 2 years. looking to upgrade to a bigger size but everything looks unreliable.
Yea, I bought one because I read they were solid performers and looked sexy to boot, but it failed on me after two weeks of light use. Shame, really-- I love the design.
Doesn't ext4 have optimizations for flash devices?
It does, but of course they only test Windows filesystems, making it all very fair and unbiased...
@Nicholas
This might be because "they" is some random guy with a PC running Windows and SiSoft Sandra. You should be grateful to have this information at all, OR if you didn't care about this information in the first place you should have skipped past the article.
Maybe *you* should do tests on alternate file systems, since it's apparently so important.
I'm sorry but it appears as though this gentleman has a bit too much time on his hands.
yes because your were being so much more resourceful with your comments
Niz, that would have been much funnier if I'd been able to read it first go. +1 anyway.
even though I hate his guts (really)
he has a point, I like a lock-button/switch on my USB drive... esp to prevent infections to my precious virusfree pc from louzy maintained computers. But In vista it automagically blocks any autoruns; preventing hazardous .exes to run.
Or when you share some files you always have idiots who cut/paste in stead of copy paste :-(
Why the hell does he only test Windows-compatible filesystems!?
Aside from the obvious FAT32 woes over NTFS like file size limited to 3.99GB, lack of ACLs, no native compression and encryption support, fewer people know that if you move your files from a NTFS partition to a FAT32 formatted flash drive, the Alternate Data Streams of your documents will be lost, and the time stamps of your files and folders will be discarded and/or truncated, and THAT is a big problem.
You can avoid that by using special file transfer or data recovery software that gives you the capability to keep all those things and more.
I was really disappointed not to see some corn kernels popping in the center of that circle of USB sticks. Obviously these aren't high-power USB drives.
chubby chaser!
Apple is the best and second is Ubuntu which is free.
I actually gave you a + on this one, due to the way you merged STD with the three OSes.. But please stop trolling already >_
if i wasnt so sure that you were an idiot and were serious in all your comments, they might actually be entertaining.
but too bad. down ranked to oblivion you go.
Oh really ? You know Mac's have viruses too eh, and to make it worse I do have a few contained on mine just to mess with.
It would have been nice to see how the Buffalo RUF2-S compared to those in their tests but unfortunately I don't think it's available in the US. http://is.gd/huKd.
Disk Free Space 1.0 310 KB, FreeWare
Disk Free Space - This program shows the amount of free space on logical disk computer.
Designed for Windows, tested on Windows XP Pro SP2.
Displays in the Windows system tray information about free space on your hard drive.
Information is shown only for the hard disk partitions. Holiday, network and other drives are ignored.
The period of the disk and update the information equivalent to 10 seconds.
http://diskfree.co.cc/p114737-disk-free-space-1-0.cfm