Have you ever tried to format your USB Flash Drive in Windows Xp and realize that the NTFS option is not in the format menu for you to choose? The options you see are only Fat16 and Fat32. It does not mean that you can’t format your USB Flash Drive using NTFS in Windows Xp, it just require a few clicks of your mouse and that option will be available.
Why format with NTFS? The biggest reason is that Fat does not support file sizes above 4GB, so if you have a dvd or any file larger than 4GB then you would not be able to transfer those file to the usb drive. NTFS also supports per file permission,encryption,and file compression.
Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not have this problem because this type of formatting is supported by these two operating systems.
I will show you how to enable NTFS formating in Windows Xp.
Click on start, right click on my computer and choose manage.
The computer management window will popup.In the left of that window click Device Manager.
The device manager will appear to the right. Click the + beside Disk drives and this will reveal your USB drive (in my case a Sandisk Usb drive,yours may vary). Right click on the USB Drive and select properties to bring up the Device Properties window.
In the device properties window select the Policies and under the Policies tab select ‘Optimize for performance’ (please pay close attention to the information in the window)and click OK and your are done.
To verify that the changes have been made,simply go to my computer and right click on your USB Flash Drive and select ‘Format’.Now you will see the option for NTFS formating.
Your new window should look something like the one above with NTFS now available.
Photo hdcmedia
