So... after the last two days of experimenting with my USB flash drive, I decided to post the thread here. Reasons: before I first formatted the drive, the flash drive's on FAT32; after QUICK formatting it to exFAT I began having problems with missing and corrupt files; in fact it was so annoying that I reformatted it FULLY to FAT32 again and no more problems, which leaves a question: Why doesn't exFAT work on my USB drive while FAT32 works? So, at least in my point of view, exFAT has gains and drawbacks: Gains: The most significant gain is the increased speed of programs. I do Java coding a lot, especially since I have Intro to Programming class as one of my classes; thus the external drives are needed to store information, since school doesn't allow storage of greater than 100 MB and at any rate the size of USB Drive:\Intro to Programming - [REDACTED - Why should I show the teacher's name ?]\ is going to exceed 100 MB anyway (since besides the classwork and homework programs I write, I also write other programs alone). With the old FAT32 partition the speed to quit Eclipse is slow as a snail (2 minutes, to be exact); with exFAT the time is shorten to just a couple seconds. Seriously, every second feels like a minute to me . Drawbacks: File corruption and deletion, and especially errors. Whenever I tried to create a .zip file, when I reload the drive it says it was corrupted - in fact it shows this message "Please insert the last disk of the Multi-Volume set and click OK to continue" when there's only one zipped file that contains information for that! Besides that, when I reload Eclipse I found all of the projects inaccessible, and when I do get the folders working everything inside the project folders is gone! (No help when you still have 1 class to do...) Thank god I have a backup copy, but it means to redo everything. All of that repeated after the second formatting (full format, also to exFAT), and all hell stopped after I full format the drive to FAT32. And here's the gains and drawbacks of FAT32 (again, my POV): Gains: Stability. Never had I gotten a drive in FAT32 format did troubles arise. At least not yet. Drawbacks: Slowness and limitations, The larges file possible is chopped to 4GB, and a partition with FAT32 file system can go up to 32GB and that's it. Any higher and you would need NTFS or exFAT or other file systems that supports higher memory partitions. Besides the limitations, loading speed is pretty slow, so slow that I had thought once to format the drive to NTFS. I still consider whether I should format the drive to NTFS or keep it to FAT32 for the time being. Sorry that I have to rant, but exFAT just doesn't work properly with my flash drive. Anyway, just talk about FAT and exFAT in this thread, or everything related to file systems .