I know that formatting a USB Flash drive with NTFS shortens it’s life. I just can’t find out roughly how much it shortens it’s life. Does anyone know? I’ve searched all over the Internet, but can’t find any real information about this. I was interested in just writing one large video file to a Flash drive, to allow playing it on a Windows 7 PC (after formatting it with GParted Live CD, not with Windows).
NTFS is a journalling file system -it logs file system changes which necessitates more writes to the flash drive. AFAIU, even file system read access involves some write access, because all transactions are logged for error recovery etc. However, the lifespan of flash memory has improved dramatically over the recent years, and many incorporate wear-levelling circuitry to maximise lifetime, so I’m not sure that I’d worry about it for your application. It should be more than reliable enough in this situation.
That is a good question! I found your thread while searching for the answer to it. The “Disks” Application in OpenSuse works really well for the formatting. I have been moving large *.iso files around between Windows 7, SLED 11, and OpenSUSE machines, and I would agree with the answer you were given. So far, mine is still working. However, I wonder how long…