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
