Speed up your USB flash drive!

NOTE: BACK UP YOUR DRIVE BEFORE TRYING THIS!

To speed up your flash drive, there are two factors that affects the performance of the drive and depending on the operation system you are using. First, you might want to know some knowledge about these drives, usually there are two different formats are used on these drives, one is FAT32 ( this is usually the format you will get as default as it is more compatible form windows 98 onwards to Mac OS ) and the other one is NTFS ( the newer format ). The other factor that affects the performance is the AUS  ( allocation unit size ).

Lets get started, first you will have to think of the AUS this way, AUS are small blocks which stores files and you can adjust the size of those blocks. So the larger the AUS then less blocks you will have overall but more space in each one of them and vice versa. So that means if you are usually transfering large files then a larger AUS will be more suitable for you, but if you are usually transfering small files then smaller will be more ideal but this doesn't mean smaller the better this really depends on what is the size of the files.

By default a FAT32 system will use 4KB of AUS for drives up to 8GB, 8KB for drives between 8GB to 16GB and 16KB for 16GB to perhaps 32GB. For NTFS it is usually 4KB for any drive above 2GB, the reason why it is so small is because Windows XP is not so good at handling NTFS as it does not support file compression on NTFS drives with an AUS of 4KB however Vista is all good.

The way to change the size of AUS in Vista is to reformat the drive by plugging in your drive and go to my computer then right click on the drive and choose format and in there you will be able to adjust your AUS. For windows XP users you cannot do this as XP does not aloud you so you will need other program to help you with this.

Hope this helps but I can't gurantee anything so yeah try this at your own risk ! and have fun! thanks for reading