Is there a difference between a USB Flash Drive and USB External Hard Disk?

by

USB Flash Drives and USB External Hard Disks can be used on your computer in much the same way. There may be a few formatting requirements.
Question:

I have Sony DVD player BluRay disc, BDP-S370. I have a 32 Gig flash drive,
formatted FAT with Windows 7 Ultimate. It works very well with a DVD player
playing films. If I bought an external USB hard drive and formatted it the
same, would it work as the flash drive does? Is there anything I should watch
out for when buying the external drive?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #80, I look at the similarities between a USB Flash Drive and USB
External Hard Disks and how to format them for a computer and DVD player.

]]>
<![CDATA[

USB Flash and External Disks

The short answer is it will work just fine.

So, the issue is that – as far as the device you’re connecting to? It can’t really distinguish between the types of media inside that external USB drive.

If it happens to be flash memory or if it happens to be a hard disk, an actual physical hard disk, it doesn’t matter. They are both disk-like devices and they just look like “some” amount of disk storage.

One might be a little bit faster; one might be a little bit bigger than the other; but they are just disks – they are literally just disks as far as the device that they are connecting to thinks.

Formatting the drives

Now, the only thing that I would be concerned about is that, you are correct, I do believe you need to have the hard drive formatted using the FAT file system. FAT 32 should be just fine for most of the different devices that things might connect to.

That may limit you to the amount usable space on the external hard drive, I’m not sure but it’s something to be aware of.

Other than that, go for it! Grab yourself an external hard drive, format it FAT, load it up with whatever it is you’re using with that DVD player and my sense is it will work just fine.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)

Next from Answercast 80 – How do I get Windows Explorer to sort in the correct order?

Do this

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

I'll see you there!

5 comments on “Is there a difference between a USB Flash Drive and USB External Hard Disk?”

  1. An external disk I would format in NTFS. A USB flash drive is a bit faster in Fat32.

    There are a few things you cannot do with a flash drive – e.g. you cannot INCLUDE folders into the library (in Windows 7). Or you cannot move a pagefile to a stick.

    Reply

  2. From a file size perspective, remember that FAT32 can’t handle files larger than 4GB, which usually doesn’t happen unless you’re storing large videos or backup files.
    If you will be storing large files like this, then format the drive for NTFS, otherwise FAT32 is usually fine.

    Reply

  3. Some say that other operating systems or even older Win systems can’t work with NTFS. Therefore the FAT32 formatting for compatibility.

    Reply

  4. @Duane
    It’s true that older Windows OSs can’t read NTFS, but anything since Windows 2000 and XP can use NTFS. So unless you need compatibility with versions of Windows ME, 98 and earlier, you don’t have to worry about that.

    Reply

Leave a reply:

Before commenting please:

  • Read the article.
  • Comment on the article.
  • No personal information.
  • No spam.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication.

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Additional information is available at https://askleo.com/creative-commons-license/.