Why is NTFS so slow on flash drive?

metalmackey · 17 Feb 2009 at 19:07

Hi

I got a 16gb Cruzer Titanium and I installed portableapps.com and all ran ok. I converted the flash drive to ntfs (was FAT32) and it was really slow and portable firefox took AGES to load sites and even autorun didn't errrr, autorun LOL. Anyway, i've formatted it again to FAT32 with a block size of 8k and all is well again

So why is NTFS so slow on flash drives?

Ta

Echo · 17 Feb 2009 at 20:20

I got an OCZ Diesel 16GB this week and it feels the same. Not just sluggish, but seems to be reading (led flashing) randomly even when I'm not using it. Write caching aside, it can sometimes be minutes after I've last read anything on the device.

I'd have left it as FAT32 but I need 4GB+ file support. Assuming NTFS is the cause, I formatted immediately so will never know...

metalmackey · 17 Feb 2009 at 21:07

Well mine did go back to normal when I went back to FAT32, so ntfs was slow on mine.

ekam · 12 Mar 2009 at 18:17

JonJ678 · 12 Mar 2009 at 19:25

ntfs has always behaved fine for data drives, but running windows from a usb stick was painful and swiftly abandoned. Oddly running linux from one works close to as fast as an internal hard drive in most respects. -1 for ntfs...