Sandisk USB Flash Drive

diamond_dave

Just taken delivery of the above -16gb. Do I need to do anything to it before storing data? Does it need Formatting? Can I just plug and play? I really need it to store photos on hols. I also have a 8GB SDHC for the camera -14 mp -do I need to format this also. Any replies much appreciated.

dug123

They should already be formatted, but I always re-format them on my PC, also download h2testw (just google it) It is a free download which will test the card and flash drive and confirm that they are genuine (if you bought them on ebay they could well be fake) It also tells you if you have any bad sectors.

aliEnRIK

I bought a kingston a few days back that was pre-formatted FAT32
I formatted to NTFS so there are no filesize restrictions (You cant have a file more than 4Gb in size with FAT32)

googler

Don't they come with instructions?

RussJK

This thread has pretty much covered it: test the drive first, then format it depending on your needs. Other than it is a good idea to use the official SD Association's SD Formatter from here:
http://www.sdcard.org/consumers/formatter_3/

From my own testing, the SDformatter gives significantly better speed/performance, compared to using the standard Windows format tool. These are results (approximates from memory) of when I compared the two some months back, for speeds while transferring large files:

Corsair Voyager GT 16gb (25mb/sec rated)
Windows formatter: 10mb/sec
SD Formatter: 16.5mb/secc

Patriot XT Xporter 8gb (25mb/sec rated)
Windows formatter 5-12mb/sec (depending on file allocation size, etc)
SD Formatter: 16.5mb/sec

Sandisk Cruzer Micro U3 8gb
Windows formatter: 5.5mb/sec
SD Formatter: 10mb/sec (I never bothered using this much until after I used the SD formatter on it, as it was too slow initially)

Corsair Voyager GT 4gb (slower drive)
Windows formatter: 4mb/sec
SD Formatter: 5mb/sec

My USB port must be limited to 16.5mb/sec I suppose. I only discovered the SD formatter when I was looking for a solution to why the faster Corsair flash drive was getting poor speeds.