Best file system for flash drive (playing music in car)

Question

I just got a Patriot flash drive to store and play music off of on my Kenwood car stereo. It came in exFat format. I heard Ntfs was the fastest so I'm currently formatting it to ntfs. Now I'm not sure if I should have done this. I want the drive to be optimized so I can find my music fast on the stereo. Its brand new with no files on it. I plan to transfer my music to the drive with windows 10 and play them on the kenwood head unit. Is there anything I can do to optimize the flash drive for this purpose. It's a 512gb drive and I have about 400g of music and videos. Largest files are about 6gigs. I just read that MFT could be an issue because I formatted it to Ntfs. I don't want to start out with a fragmented drive before I even put any files on it. What programs should I look into to get this flash drive prepared very well for my purpose? I need help from a computer expert. What would you do if you were me?

Solution 1

Use exFAT

Excelon DMX905S supports following filesystems, according to specs on the Kenwood website:

FAT 16/32, exFAT, NTFS

Seek time difference between filesystems probably won't be noticeable unless you were to copy thousands of small files.

NTFS isn't suitable for flash drives and external drives. It will work, but it's unnecessarily complex. Some of NTFS features are unwanted on an external drive, for example support for permissions.

FAT16 is mostly obsolete at this point. It has a 2 GB partition size limit. The only advantage over FAT32 is that it's simpler to implement, but unless you're going to implement filesystem drivers, it doesn't matter.

FAT32 is the most portable out of these, but it has 4 GB file size limit, so it may not be suitable for your needs.

exFAT was designed for external drives and memory cards. It's supported by Windows and Mac OS X, there are also relatively stable Linux filesystem drivers. It doesn't have any file or partition size limits that you could exceed. It's also simpler than NTFS and doesn't have unnecessary features. Only downside: it's proprietary, but again, it doesn't matter unless you're designing a device that uses it.

Solution 2

First of all, the best file-system is always the default that the manafacture has set. Most common format is FAT32. Formating your flash dirve should only be done when you planning to do something specific or its needed cause it's not compatible with some operating systems etc.

In your case FAT32 would be the best cause it's very compatible with media-player devices like radios, consoles etc. but there could be problems with some larger files cause FAT32 supports only up to 4gb. I would try it with exFAT it's the next best one that should work with your car stereo. Next I would try other most common like HFS+, NTFS, APFS, EX2/3/4 ... Google says more about file system comparsion!

The next question would be the cluster size. If you want to store large files on that drive, a large cluster size is better as the drive will be faster. If, however, you want to store small files or run programs off your flash drive, a smaller cluster size will help preserve space. But more about that you can find here. Doing for all that I have very good experience with a tool called Partition Wizard

Useful Articles:

• Listening to Music in a Car From a USB Flash Drive
• USB stick won't play in my car
• How to Format a USB Thumb Drive for Your Car

Comments

[Appleoddity]

The manual should tell you what to use for your player.

[Stackcraft_noob]

Could you plz give more detailed infomation/ specs what flashdrive from Patriot you are sprecial using and what model of Kenwood car stereo your are using?

[Serg V]

The radio is the excelon dmx905s and it supports NFTS & all the Fats. I will have files larger than 4g so........ the Patriot is a 512g Rage 2