Best file system for external (USB) hard drives/USB memory media

Almost all external USB hard drive and USB memory media/sticks come today preformatted with FAT32.

As far as I know the only advantage of the file system is the compatibility among OSes and devices.

Is it reasonable to reformat it with exFAT or even NTFS? How this would affect the performance and security?

Solution 1:

Here is an article where extensive testing on usb drives comparing performance of FAT32, NTFS, and exFAT.

Conclusion from the testing:

"For Copying to the USB drive FAT32 took the least amount of time, with NTFS coming in second and ExFat taking on average the longest time to Copy to the drive.

Copying From and Reading From the drives were very similar in their results though, most of the time the File Systems were close, with at points NTFS taking a bit longer while FAT32 and ExFAT were nearly identical."

As far as file system security goes, if you reformat to NTFS or exFAT you will gain File System Permissions on your USB drive. Which I have never had a need for on a USB drive, because I am the only person using the drive and I do not want to limit access to my data.

Solution 2:

It's not only reasonable, but sometimes even necessary. FAT32 doesn't allow files >4GB.

As for choice between NTFS and exFAT. Well, neither vanilla XP nor vanilla Linux support exFAT, but they do support NTFS.