Each user of a personal computer, collectively the owner of a flash drive or other storage medium, should know what formatting is, why it is needed and how to do it.
Today, there are several storage media, each of which requires mandatory regular formatting, these are: hard disks (HDD) installed directly on the computer, ordinary disks (CD, DVD and Blu-ray), as well as USB flash drives.
What is formatting and why is it needed?
The very concept of formatting, of any medium, implies a change in its file system. As a rule, such a procedure leads to a complete cleaning of the medium, that is, all information stored on it will be completely deleted. This begs the question: "Why format the media at all if all the information on it is deleted?" This is done so that the user can fix its integrity, optimize the work, that is, increase the speed of performing certain tasks and, of course, change the file system (if necessary). Formatting is necessarily carried out in several cases, these are:
- infection of the carrier with a virus;
- the speed of performing various tasks with a medium (for example, transferring information to a computer) has decreased many times.
How to format a USB flash drive?
As for the procedure for formatting a flash drive itself, this can be done even using the standard software of the Windows operating system. In order to use the standard functionality of the OS, you need to open "My Computer" and select the removable media on which you need to right-click. Next, in the context menu, select the "Format" function. After clicking, a new window will open where the user can select "File System", "Cluster Size", and "Formatting Method".
A flash drive is characterized by the FAT32 file system, since it is it that is used to store and use small files. If you are going to store large files on a USB flash drive, then choose NTFS. The cluster size indicates the speed of execution of various commands for files (the optimal value is set by default by the system itself). As for the formatting method, there are several of them, these are: fast and complete. It is advisable to do exactly the full formatting, so that the damaged sectors of the removable disk are restored, and the file system is successfully changed. If this is not necessary, and you regularly format your USB flash drive, then you can select "Quick Format".
