This would work fine if the drive stayed inside your computer. For example, the files might be set to only be accessible by a specific user ID number. In fact, these can cause problems when moving removable devices between different machines. The device doesn’t need file permissions, either.In fact, journaling could just result in additional writes that could reduce the life of the drive’s flash memory. Your removable drive doesn’t need journaling like a system drive does.You may occasionally want to copy a file over 4GB in size to the drive - that’s the one situation where you might want to format the drive as NTFS. Your USB stick or SD card will definitely be under 2TB in size, so you don’t need to worry about the upper limit.Of course, none of the above reasons are really problems on USB sticks and SD cards. NTFS is more secure, robust, and supports larger file sizes and drives.īut These Aren’t Problems On Removable Drives System files can be made read-only so typical programs can’t touch them, users can be prevented from looking at other users’ data, and so on.Īs we can see, there are very good reasons why Windows uses NTFS for system partitions. With NTFS, file permissions allow for increased security. FAT32 doesn’t support file permissions.If the computer loses power in the middle of a file being written, the system won’t need a long scandisk operation to recover.

With NTFS, changes are logged to a “journal” on the drive before they’re actually made.

FAT32 isn’t a journaling file system, which means that file system corruption can happen much more easily.

if you had a 3TB drive, you couldn’t format it as a single FAT32 partition. For example, if you had a large video file over 4GB in size, you just couldn’t save it on the FAT32 file system.

FAT32 only supports individual files up to 4GB in size and volumes up to 2TB in size.

To understand why Windows uses NTFS, we have to look at the problems with FAT32 and how NTFS fixed them: Microsoft created NTFS to improve on FAT32 in a variety of different ways. The Problems With FAT32 (or Why Microsoft Created NTFS)

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