Re: speaking of USB formatting.

On 6/3/26 18:22, Karen Lewellen wrote:
> Hi folks,
> A slight dance step to the left question from the previous thread.
> ...makes humble confession.
> I have never needed to buy a USB stick before.  External USB drive, yes. 
> stick no.
> However, after a challenging install of rockbox to my IPod classic, all 
> of its contents now exist in a zip archive.
> I want to safely move this zip file onto something else, with the goal 
> of having the USB stick easily seen, think files directory,  if that 
> makes sense.
> So, is it best to live the stick unformated?
> Seemed the prior thread had a member meeting with challenges by 
> formatting in advance.
> For greatest flexibility in a Linux, or Unix environment?
> 
> Thanks,
> Kare


If you want to use a drive (USB flash, USB/SATA SSD, USB/SATA HDD, SD 
card) with various operating systems (Windows, Linux, BSD, macOS, etc.), 
then get a drive that is formatted with either FAT32 or exFAT.  The 
FAT32 file system should have broader compatibility/ support than exFAT. 
  Either or both may require additional drivers for read/write access on 
some platforms.


Note that FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4,294,967,295 bytes (4 GiB - 
1).  If you plan to put big files on the drive (such as your zip 
archive), exFAT may be required.


Currently sold smaller USB flash drives (<= 32 GiB?) tend to have FAT32. 
  Currently sold larger drives (>= 64 GiB?) tend to have exFAT.


While you can wipe and reformat a USB flash drive using Debian 
GNU/Linux, I prefer using current Windows because FAT32 and exFAT are 
Microsoft technologies and Windows should produce a canonical result.


That said, have you considered a USB HDD or USB SSD?  I would expect 
better performance, notably writes (sequential and random).  This would 
save time and make the drive more useful for bulk transfers, backups, 
archives, images, etc..  If you choose a drive that is 2 TB or smaller, 
you could use MBR partitioning, which should have broader compatibility/ 
support than GPT; notably with older computer/ motherboard firmware (BIOS).


David