Every day, a device called a usb flash drive, better known as a flash drive, enters the life of personal computer users and gradually crowds out other types of storage media. If floppy disks and zip-drives “died out” even before the era of flash drives, then with the appearance of these devices from four to thirty-two gigabytes in size, they significantly displaced various disk media on the market - why buy cd or dvd disks constantly, if it’s much more convenient and more profitable to get one or two flash drives?
But, despite the wide distribution of these devices, not all users know how to properly format a flash drive and how it is best and easiest to carry out this operation. And for starters, let's figure out why formatting a flash drive is generally necessary.
This operation is necessary in order to perform a complete “zeroing” of all data stored on the storage medium from time to time, since regular deletion (despite the fact that when a flash drive is “cleaned” always permanently deletes files), it is not always possible to erase absolutely all data completely . In addition, formatting a flash drive allows you to change the cluster size and / or file system structure, which significantly affects the ability to work with flash media on various devices.
The performance of the flash drive on various devices depends on the choice of the file system. In the Windows operating systems in the last few years, two types of main file systems have been used - NTFS and FAT32. Any computer running Microsoft operating systems will be able to work with any of these file systems (with the exception of MSDos and Windows 95, which are almost never used today), but devices like DVD players, car radios, and most other household appliances are not able to read information from flash drives with the NTFS file system. But many advanced personal computer users refuse the FAT file system because of its one significant drawback - the maximum file size in the FAT16 system is limited to two gigabytes, and in the FAT32 system it is limited to four gigabytes, which makes it almost impossible and extremely inconvenient to use these file systems for flash drives high volume. For flash drives larger than eight gigabytes, the NTFS file system is ideally suited, since in this system the file size is limited solely by the volume of the medium.
Formatting a flash drive is quite simple - just connect the media to a computer or laptop, press the right button on the flash drive icon and select the “Format” item in the menu that appears. In the window that appears, you can select not only the file system that will be installed on the USB flash drive after formatting, but also the size of the cluster, which will determine the speed of reading from the device - the larger the cluster size (it’s considered to be “standard” size four kilobytes), the faster information will be read. However, it should be remembered that when pulling a USB flash drive from a computer without using the safe removal of the device, one of the clusters will be damaged each time - the smaller the cluster, the less memory you will lose.
In the formatting window, you can also specify which formatting of the flash drive you need to produce. If you select "Quick formatting", the computer simply clears the table of contents of the medium, thereby preserving all the information at a deeper level - if desired and using special programs, the information after the quick formatting procedure is quite simple to recover. If you want to completely destroy all information on the media without the possibility of recovery, you need to format at a low level. Flash drives after that are completely “reset” and all information recorded on them earlier is destroyed permanently.