format flash drives before using

Does a flash drive have to be formatted before being used. If so and there is a choice between FAT & NTFS, I take it using an NTFS system it would have to be formatted for NTFS. If what I say above is so, can a flash drive that will only format to FAT not be used to store data from an NTFS system. Thanks for reading and in advance for any help offered. hedley

You didn't say whether the SSD is new or not, but both these links should set you right.

About and setting up SSD FAQ:
http://club.myce.com/f138/ssd-faq-297856/


"TweakTown's Solid State Drive Optimization Guide (W7)"
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3116/twe…uide/index.html

Cheers,
Lee

don't think hedley93 is talking about ssd's lee, but just a usb flash/pen drive. yes, hedley93 a flash drive needs to be formatted before use, i think most come already formatted anyway. yes a drive formatted with fat file system can be used, read/written to, by an operating system on a ntfs file system, and vice versa. and actually for usb flash/pen drives(not ssd's) it is recommended that they are formatted with a fat file system and not ntfs, my memories a bit flaky at times, so can't now remember why fat is recommended over ntfs where usb flash/pen drives are concerned, but do know that it is.

Thank for the correction terry,

In Oz we call them Thumb Drives or USB drives. A flash drive is an SSD (literally), so I was a bit confused there.

Thumb Drives come pre-formated in FAT format (not NTFS), though they can be re-formated with the right software as NTFS. For a Thumb drive or paging file FAT 32 is usually better suited as it's slightly faster and due to it's larger cluster size, less likely to fragment. It's the reason my 10GB paging file partition is formated as FAT32 (on a separate HDD to my OS) and my Thumb drives are kept in FAT format.

You can read more here on FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc938440.aspx

Thanks for the replies, guys. It is a flash drive I'm asking about, not an ssd drive. That's plenty of info to keep me going for a while. Thank you both for your help, much appreciated, as always. hedley