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Monday, October 18, 2010

If you have an unbearably slow memory stick...

3:55 PM / Technology / 5 Comments

...try formatting it as FAT32 rather than NTFS.

Sounds like a step backwards, I know, but in my case I saw a very significant improvement in performance. A couple of months back, I bought a 16 GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT for use when working between my two machines (the high-end system downstairs and the laptop I mainly keep in my bedroom). For the sake of expediency, it makes sense for me to simply save to the memory stick all the time rather than copying my files from one machine to the other (although I do of course perform frequent backups).

I bought the Corsair because of the company's reputation for manufacturing fast, reliable hardware, coupled with the impressive read/write speeds they were boasting. In reality, however, I found that I got only a fraction of the advertised write speed, with even small files (such as a basic spreadsheet or single-page Word document) taking upwards of five seconds to save. That might not sound too bad, but if like me you have a habit of hitting "Control + S" at frequent intervals, it soon becomes extremely annoying. (This is particularly true of Final Draft 8, the screenwriting program I use and probably the single most unreliable piece of software I've ever come across. Continually saving your work is an absolute must.)

So today I decided to try a little experiment. I reformatted the stick from NTFS to the older FAT32 file system... and immediately saw a massive increase in performance. Documents now save in a fraction of a second, and even when copying my documents back over from the hard drive, I could see how much the write speed had improved. This may not be the whole story (both times, I formatted the device using Windows' default settings, and the differing default allocation unit sizes for FAT32 and NTFS might also be a potential factor), but for me it was a very painless way of squeezing considerably more performance out of a device I use on a daily basis. Definitely worth trying if you've got the memory stick blues.

5 Comments

 
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