Format a USB Flash Drive to NTFS on Win XP Windows XP Only: Today’s USB flash drives are huge, but they come formatted with the FAT32 file size limit of 4GB. Windows XP does have the ability to format drives with the NTFS file system, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the format dialog – normally the option is disabled. If you want to format them to NTFS under Windows XP you’ll need this little trick... - Open the Device Manager and find your USB drive under Disk Drives. - Right click and choose Properties, click the Policies tab and choose “Optimize for performance”. - Click OK and now you’ll see the NTFS option in the format dialog. WARNING: Once you’ve enabled write caching you will need to use the Safely Remove Hardware dialog to avoid losing data – though once you format the drive as NTFS you can switch the write caching back off. The choice between NTFS and FAT32 isn’t cut-and-dried. While NTFS does allow larger file sizes, encryption, compression, and permissions, there’s a lot more overhead to using it and more importantly, it won’t really work on non-Windows systems.