Have you ever noticed your USB flash drive to which file system it belongs, and what if you want to change the file system of your drive to some other ? This post article will furnish your knowledge with the advantages and disadvantages of changing the file system and the steps for the transformation.

If you are observant enough you should notice when you try to defrag your hard drive, the file system of any USB drive usually in FAT32. Even if you try to format your USB drive you are only left with 2 option; FAT and FAT32. FAT32 is the default setting in Windows XP and there must be a good reason why it is set so. Examining the pros and cons of each system file seems to be a perfect way of portraying the essence of FAT32 system and why we want it to be formatted in NTFS. The following are the pros and cons regarding these file systems and how to enable NTFS system in the hard drive.

Let’s get down to the advantages and disadvantages of FAT32 and NTFS.

Advantages: Enabling NTFS in removable storage devices allows us to add allow and deny permissions on individual files and folders for specific Windows users; that’s the function not available in FAT file system. NTFS also allows files to be encrypted by using Windows XP’s built-in encryption. Space on the storage device can also be improved due to compression capability. Last but not least disk quotas can also be set and even creating partitions!

Disadvantages: There are, however, few drawbacks when using NFTS on a USB drive. First and foremost, it requires more writing to the USB drive. Thus slower access to the device but not to the extend that turns off people from using it. As far as the encryption is concerned you will not be able to access them from other computers. This could be a perfect feature, depending to what extend you want to secure the USB drive. If you think this will cause trouble when you need to do use it in multiple stations then don’t do the files encryption.

Below i will show you the essential steps needed to transform your USB drive from FAT/FAT32 file system to NTFS :

How to enable your USB with NTFS ?

1. Connect your USB flash drive with your computer. Right-click on My Computer from the desktop and choose “Manage”. 

2. Click on "Device Manager" and expand out "Disk Drives". There are maybe couple of drives depending on how many USB drive & hard drive connected to your PC.

3. Right click on USB drive and select "Properties". Next, click on the "Policies" tab and choose "Optimize for performance" radio button. Finally click OK and you are done!

If you right-click on USB drive and select "Format.." you will observe NTFS is now enabled. If you find any difficulty performing above steps and your have any query related to the topic please feel free to ask.