If not, then do not add permissions or encrypt the files.

If you want to secure your USB stick so that only your user account on your one computer can open the files, then using encryption or permissions is perfectly fine. Actually, this can be considered a downside or an upside depending on what you want to do.

The other major downside is that if you encrypt your files on the USB drive or use any kind of file permissions, you will not be able to open them anywhere else. will most likely only be able to read FAT32. All other devices like cameras, smartphones, TVs, tablets, etc. Also, versions of Windows older than 2000 (except some versions of Windows NT) cannot read NTFS file systems, nor can most Linux systems until recently, so your compatibility goes down significantly. It will also reduce the life of your flash memory on USB drives because of the extra writes. Firstly, there is a lot more writes to the drive that are required when using NTFS and therefore access to the device will be slower. However, there are also a few drawbacks to using NFTS on a USB drive. You can also set disk quotas and even create partitions! So formatting USB drives with NTFS has several advantages that would be good if you need to use some of these advanced features, i.e. Other benefits include the ability to compress files and therefore save space on your USB drive. NTFS is a journaling file system, which means that before an actual change is made to the data, it is first logged in a “journal” so that if something happens in the middle of writing data, the system can recover quickly and not need to be repaired. So if you want to format your 5 TB external hard drive as a single volume with FAT32, you wouldn’t be able to do it.įiles stored on FAT32 file systems also have a much higher chance of being corrupted as opposed to NTFS.

FAT32 can only work with files up to 4G in size and volumes up to 2TB in size. Another major benefit of switching to NTFS is that you are no longer restricted to storing files less than 4GB in size on the device.

Format usb drive to ntfs on mac