First sorry for bumping old thread. (oh wait somone beat me to it yesterday!)
So i just browsed aliexpress for some cheap chinese usb drive for a keychain. In description the seller wrote :
“You’d better not format your U disk causually because it is harmful.” (nice engrish)
I tried searching google for “does formatting damage flash drive”, and then i remembered this old thread.
It seems like the common knowledge and advice out there is : Go ahead format all you like, it only wears as much on your drive as a normal data write would. You have to dig a little deeper to find the skeptics. A few people on forums mention that some manufacturers now warn against formatting their drives.
But one thing i did learn was that formating or converting to NTFS is a bad bad idea (because of constant and increased activity) - not sure this was clarified in this thread.
So to summarize:
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Formating your drive makes it lose the custom logical block offset which was put in to provide (sometimes radically) improved transfer speeds.
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Don’t use the built in windows format. Use HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool for example.
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Use stock filesystem, if absolutely needed format to Fat16, fat32 or exFat as Ed_p said. Avoid NTFS at all cost
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If still too slow, try different block sizes.
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Ed_p is a tough nut to dance with, but he is alright after all
