I very recently purcahsed a Sandisk Extreme 32gb USB drive and found it to be formatted at FAT32. I want to reformat it to exFAT to allow large file sizes to be copied. I read on another thread that if you reformat the drive there will be a major performance loss. My question is this: If I reformat my drive to the exFAT format will the read/write speeds be affected. If so, will there be a drastic difference? Also, will I be able to revert back to its original factory format and speeds afterwards?
Actually no. The factory configuration is as Super Floppy config. No MBR, no partition table. Reformating will not do that. There is also a question of cluster alignment which probably won’t be able to be reproduced.
Will it be faster, don’t know. But if you do before and after tests please post the results.
I also noticed a little degradation in performance … here are my results first (factory format) and after (fat32 windows formatted). I tried to play with allocation sizes but didn’t change much
