I have several flash drives that I used with windows xp. They are formatted in fat and some of them don't/won't read on windows 7. All my internal and external drives are formatted to NTFS, as they were on windows xp.
Are the flash drives better formatted to NTFS before I put any other data on them? I don't want the data to 'disappear' after a while as it has done in the past. Whether this was the fault of wrong formatting or faulty flash drives I don't know, but they were all new at the time. Then data wasn't there when I went to access it a couple of months later. Some were ok.
Also, I take it floppy disks can't be formatted to NTFS?
Thanks for reading and in advance for any help offered.
hedley
You can format them in NTFS, BUT, it is not really beneficial, data transfer is far slower, I tried as a test once pondering such things myself, and in my experience I found data transfer seriously slower in NTFS, so it is best to leave them in fat format IMHO, Windows 7 will read it just fine, mine does anyway, the only time it wont is if it thinks the data is corrupted, most commonly caused by removing the drive before it's safe to do so, you should always use the safe remove option and wait until it frees up the drive, but I have on rare occasions found it gets upset between different systems, so use it on a system that sees it, save the data, then put it back in the problem system, then if need be format it in FAT format, the system should see it fine after this, but no idea about the floppy's though, but I doubt it.
