USB Drive Question

Hi All,

I have hooked up a 16MB USB drive, and I decided to compress the drive to allow for more storage...My question is, can this be reversed to allow me to convert the drive to FAT 32 if I so desire?

Is one format better than the other?

Thanks

Edit: I am running W98se.

 

James Martin,

Go ahead and compress the drive. It's probably impossible to uncompress a drive that's more than half full, but you can certainly copy the contents to your HDD and uncompress it then. I think fat32 would be inefficient on such a small drive.

Or did you mean 16GB? Then it depends on what you use it for. I've heard that fat32 is more efficient on larger disks.

 

Hi sparrow,

Thanks for responding....It is a 16MB drive (It's small, but I only paid $7.50 for it).

Will FAT32 give me more storage than drive compression?

 

Hi James Martin,

I suspect compression will do a better job, but I can't find a comparison. This may offer some enlightenment.

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/file/partSlack.html

 

Thanks Sparrow...Looks like a lot of great info...I'll bookmark the site.