[Discuss] USB thumbdrive, Linux only usage: FAT vs NTFS vs other? TRIM support?

[brendan at glump.net (Brendan Kidwell)]

I bought a 16GB USB thumbdrive from Staples last week to use as a
shuttle for some documents, scripts, and programs' data folders that
will be used on my desktop and my laptop in turns. I'll probably be
giving Stan's Data Bag project ( http://www.data-bag.org/ ) a spin,
too.

I feel like a cargo cult programmer trying to figure out the best way
to format and mount this thing and I'm looking for some advice. On the
other hand, I know that I'm getting ridiculously theoretical about a
what amounts to an $11 piece of paper. :^) But that's what we
sometimes like to do in BLU.

First, I know that SSD devices -- the term seems to be reserved for
things that connect to your computer over a faster bus than USB --
like to use the ATA TRIM command for the OS to let the device know a
block/sector is switching from used to unused state. "hdparm" does not
indicate that my thumbdrive supports it. It's a PNY 16GB "USB Flash
Drive" that says "Key \n Attach?" at the bottom of the package. Should
I care that TRIM doesn't seem to be supported?

For Linux-only use, what filesystem should I use? vFAT/FAT32 is
clearly the standard, but doesn't it use unreasonably large allocation
block sizes?

I have had trouble with using Unix-native filesystems on portable
drives in the past, instead of vFAT, because the OS wants to record
owners to objects and those owners don't make any sense on another
machine. Is there a simple workaround for that?

So I think I'm deciding between vFAT and NTFS, but I have heard
suggestions in the past that some thumbdrives' firmware might use
their knowledge of FAT to do high level, filesystem-specific cleanup
with respect to TRIMming, even though the client OS is treating it as
a dumb block device that happens to have a FAT filesystem. Is there
any truth to that and should I avoid NTFS as a result?