Formatting the flash drive. Step-by-step instruction

Every day a device called usb flash drive, better known as a USB flash drive, enters the life of users of personal computers and gradually replaces other types of media. If diskettes and zip-drives "died out" before the era of flash drives, then with the advent of these devices in the volume of four to thirty-two gigabytes, they significantly pressed the market for various disk drives - why constantly buy cd or dvd disks, if much more convenient And it is more advantageous to get one or two flash drives?

But, despite the wide distribution of these devices, not all users know how to properly format the flash drive and how it is better and easier to perform this operation. And first, let's figure out why you need to format the flash drive.

This operation is necessary in order to from time to time perform a complete "zeroing" of all data stored on the storage medium, since the usual removal (even though the USB flash drive always purges the file permanently), it is not always possible to erase absolutely all the data completely . In addition, the formatting of the flash drive allows you to change the size of the cluster and / or the structure of the file system, which significantly affects the ability to work with flash media on various devices.

From the choice of the file system depends on the performance of the flash drive on certain devices. In Windows operating systems in the last few years, two types of main file systems have been used - NTFS and FAT32. Any computer running operating systems from Microsoft will be able to work with any of these file systems (with the exception of those that are not used today in MSDos and Windows 95), but devices like DVD players, car radios and most other home appliances are not able to read information With USB flash drive with NTFS file system. But many advanced users of personal computers refuse the FAT file system because of its one significant drawback - the maximum file size in the FAT16 system is limited to two gigabytes, and in the FAT32 system - four gigabytes, which makes it practically impossible and extremely inconvenient to use these file systems for flash drives Large volume. For flash drives larger than eight gigabytes, the NTFS file system is ideally suited, since in this system the file size is limited solely to the amount of media.

To format the flash drive is quite simple - just connect the media to a computer or laptop, press the right button on the USB flash drive icon and select the menu item "Format". In the appeared window you can select not only the file system that will be installed on the USB flash drive after formatting, but also the cluster size, which will determine the speed of reading from the device - the larger the cluster size (its "standard" size is usually considered four kilobytes), the faster The information will be read. However, it should be remembered that when pulling a USB flash drive out of the computer without using a secure device ejection, one of the clusters will be damaged each time - the smaller the cluster, the less memory space you will lose.

In the format window, you can also specify which formatting of the flash drive is necessary. If you select "Quick Format", the computer will simply clear the contents table of the media, thus saving all the information at a deeper level - if desired and using special programs, the information after the quick formatting procedure is fairly simple to restore. If you want to completely destroy all the information on the media without the possibility of recovery, you must perform formatting at a low level. Flash drives after this completely "reset" and all information recorded on them earlier, is destroyed irrevocably.