Format your flash drive as FAT32

Many flash controllers (UFD, SD, and CF) are not optimized for NON-FAT32 filesystems. Reformatting your flash drive with a different file system (eg: NTFS or exFAT) can cause the drive to fail or degrade performance.

We frequently see different encoding schemes used on the first few megabytes of data than on the remaining data. The former scheme is designed for frequent random writes and the latter for frequent sequential reads. This model appears to fit a FAT32 filesystem. Using a NON-FAT32 file system such as NTFS or exFAT may degrade the performance and longevity of the media.

We recommend using the original file system that the drive was shipped with, in most cases FAT32. If your operating system doesn’t allow you to format the drive as FAT32 we recommend using rufus. It’s a nifty utility for formatting USB flash drives however remember to untick Create a bootable disk image.