Formatting USB (Flash) Drive with NTFS File System

You already know that Windows operating system supports FAT (File Allocation Table: FAT16, FAT32) and NTFS (NT File System) file system (FS). In earlier versions (Win90 and older) FAT was the supporting FS but from Win2K/WinXP (which are NT based) Microsoft gave us the opportunity to use NTFS file system as well. We can format disk drives into NTFS but as far I know many people (including me as of last monthJ ) do not know how to format USB (Flash) disk with NTFS file system. This article is about this issue.

NTFS has advantages over FAT such as improved support for metadata, performance, reliability, data compression, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling, strong against power failures. NTFS is far more better FS over FAT32, so you probably would like to stick with it.

Inspect the Issue:

First of all, insert your USB (Flash) drive into USB port, open My Computer > Right click the USB drive and select ‘Format..’. In the “Format…” dialog box, under File System drop down list you can see that NTFS is missing!

Caution: DO NOT PRESS ‘Enter’ or ‘Start’ button without reading warning.

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Well, close the dialog box, right click the USB drive and click properties. Select “Hardware” tab and from the list select the entry that match your USB drive and press ‘properties’ button.

Click ‘Optimize for Performance’ on “Policies” tab. This will enable a cache for the drive to improve disk performance. Now right-click your USB drive in My Computer and click ‘Format…’ now the NTFS option is available. You can enable compression as well.

Beware that formatting the disk will erase all its content, so before continuing backup your data in safe place. Also, do not play with NTFS security (disk properties > Security tab) without knowing exactly what you do. I fell in that situation in 2002, lost access to my data (over 15GB).

Thank you for reading the article. Please leave comment if you have any!