Do you know that pen drives are formatted in FAT32? Do you know that maximum file size supported by FAT32 is 4GB? Did you ever try to copy files bigger than 4GB in your pen drive, only to be confronted by some error?

Today we have pen drives of 8GB, 32GB and more capacity ones are coming. It is natural that we try to copy files which are bigger than 4GB into them. Unfortunately FAT32 does not support single files bigger than 4GB. You need to format your pen drive in NTFS for that.

In Windows (XP) when you try to format the pen drive you are provided with FAT32 as the only option. This is probably because of portable nature of pen drives. In NTFS you can set permissions and encrypt files too. These files then may not open on other computers. Furthermore, NTFS needs more writing than FAT32. This is maybe because of the small cluster size of NTFS.

To be able to format pen drives in NTFS you will need to enable “Optimize for Performance” mode. Ples follow through the steps of this excellent article – http://blog.eches.net/tips/how-to-format-usb-drive-with-ntfs/. Ubuntu users should know that this OS already runs in optimized for performance mode.