File system choices available to you depend on the type of media you are formatting. With hard disks, the only option made available by Disk Management is NTFS. If you want to format a hard disk in FAT or FAT32, you need to use the command-prompt Format command, with the /fs switch. (Type format /? at the command prompt for details.) The only good reason to do this, however, is for the sake of compatibility with systems running Windows 9x. (See “The Advantages of NTFS,” later in this chapter.) If you’re dual-booting with Windows 9x and want the data on the volume you’re formatting to be accessible to the Windows 9x partition, you should choose FAT32. Note that the 16-bit FAT, while still available, is a relic of much older days when disks were dramatically smaller. It’s appropriate for floppy disks and very small hard-disk partitions only.
If you’re formatting a USB flash disk, on the other hand, FAT32 is a reasonable choice. In the first place, a fl ash disk is likely to serve at times as a transfer medium, possibly with systems running earlier versions of Windows. Secondly, because NTFS is a journaling file system, reading and writing files on NTFS disks involves more disk IO than similar operations on FAT32 disks. Flash disks can perform a finite number of reads and writes before they need to be replaced—hence they will likely have a longer life expectancy under FAT32 than under NTFS.
