test flash drive

Basil Chupin blchupin at iinet.net.au
Fri Nov 26 06:50:17 UTC 2010


On 26/11/2010 16:55, Doug wrote:
> I've ordered some flash drives at an attractive price, with a
> well-known brand name, but they are coming from Hong-Kong,
> so I don't know what I'll really get.  Can they be tested some
> way, and if so, how?  (Hopefully they will be here in a few days.)
> I don't know if flash drives come formatted or not;
> presumably I could format one with gparted to any common
> format.  If so, what format?  I would think NTFS would be the
> most universally useful, assuming they work OK.  Or FAT32?
> (I don't remember if gparted can format to M/S formats.)
> I use both Linux and Win7.
>
> Thanx for your input--doug
>    

Flash drives - from wherever - come formatted with FAT(32). And I have 
yet to come across a flash drive which did not come from Asia.

You can format the flash drive with whatever file system you want. I 
have formatted them with ext4, ext3, ext2, NTFS. gparted is one of the 
utils which will do the formatting for you (either on a standalone CD or 
as available on the installation CD for K/Ubuntu).

Since Linux can handle both FAT and NTFS then if you are looking for 
"universal" access then use either one - NTFS would be preferred I would 
think (provided the latest Windows' formatting is compatible with the 
NTFS used in previous releases [I mention this because NTFS after XP is 
slightly different to XP, and what it is now I simply do not know]) 
because you are not restricted to limited file sizes.

BC

-- 
ATTORNEY:  Now doctor, isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he
                    doesn't know about it until the next morning?
WITNESS:   Did you actually pass the bar exam?





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