Interesting idea for Vista on SSD machines

edit: typo and formatting

I was playing with Vista on a friend's machine awhile back and noticed that the command line version of format allows the UDF file system in Vista. I tried formatting a USB flash disk using UDF and found it to be tremendously faster than ntfs OR fat32, especially with folders containing numerous small files and subfolders. Try it yourself if you've got vista running (on any machine) and a spare flash drive to play with. Copy a large folder of small files to the drive and record the time it takes to write the files in fat and ntfs. Then format the drive using the following syntax:

format x: /fs:udf /q

x is your drive letter, /fs:udf specifies to use the udf file system, q is used to perform a quick format.

Now try the test again and see how long it takes. Much faster eh? (Unfortunately, XP can only read UDF... You won't want to keep your drive this way unless you're only using vista.)

Furthermore, it sounds like people have gotten around the NTFS requirement for vista according to articles like this: http://www.windowsvistaplace.com/install-windows-vista-on-a-fat32-partition/windows-vista. They are running it on fat32 without issues. Does that mean it might be possible to run vista on a much faster udf partition as well?

Anyone with an SSD system and some spare time want to attempt TinyVista on a UDF partition?