Why is fat32 default

As mentioned above, when the PC writes and reads data, the unit is cluster not sector. In general, the larger cluster size you use, the fewer clusters the files will use, and then the faster the files are accessed by OS.

But the disadvantage is space waste. The principle is as follows taking 5 KB data as an example : when you set cluster size as bytes, the 5 KB data will use 10 clusters to save data but there is no space waste; when the cluster size is 4K, the 5KB data will use 2 clusters 8 KB space to save data and 3 KB space will be wasted, because a cluster can only be occupied by one file.

However, when you use fewer clusters to save data, the OS will look for the data more easily, reaching faster data access speed. Correspondingly, when you use a smaller cluster size, you can make use of disk space more fully but the data access speed will be slower.

What allocation unit size should I use for FAT32? Some people may wonder about this problem. Actually, it depends on the size of files you want to store on the disk. If most of these files are large, you can set a larger FAT allocation unit size. Thus, space waste is not severe and the file access speed will not be slowed down.

If you want to store many small files, you can set allocation unit size FAT32 to a small value, to fully utilize storage space. How to break FAT32 partition size limit? If you want to customize the allocation unit size FAT32, you can benchmark the FAT32 partition when allocating different cluster sizes to it.

As for the disk benchmark software, you can use MiniTool Partition Wizard. Here is the guide:. Free Download. Click Disk Benchmark tool. Select FAT32 partition and set other benchmark parameters. Then, click Start. Then, change the cluster size of the partition and benchmark it again, until you find the best FAT32 allocation unit size. Actually, this also depends on what you use them for. If you use them to store small files, you should use small cluster size.

If the files are large, you can also set a large cluster size. Of course, if you use them for phones, cameras, game consoles, you can format them in these devices and choose the default cluster size. If you want to change allocation size, Windows only allows you to do that when formatting or creating a partition. If you want to change the cluster size FAT32 via formatting, please transfer important data to another drive in advance, because formatting will destroy data in the partition.

Of course, you can now buy hard drives with 3TB or more of storage space. These will probably come formatted as NTFS so they can use the full amount of storage on a single partition.

This is why you really want to use FAT32 on your removable drives, so you can use them with almost any device. Ultimately, what you probably want to do is leave the drive formatted with the file system it came with. Jolanta is the Technology Enthusiast based website. View all posts by Jolanta. You are commenting using your WordPress.

It can support volumes as large as TB, and its file size support tops out at 16 EiB. But it is read-only with Mac, some Linux distributions. In addition, they also differ in fault tolerance, security, compression, etc.

So there is no clear winner when it comes to FAT32 vs. Which is better and which one to choose mainly depend on your individual needs and uses. For example, if you want to use the USB on older computers, or non-PC systems like Smart TVs, printers, projector, digital cameras and other portable devices, etc, choose FAT32 because it is universally supported. If you are choosing a file system for the system drive backup or other internal drives, select NTFS instead.

The most common method is to format this drive again, but that will erase everything on the drive. You can download the freeware and have a try. Step 1.