Originally posted by: unbiased
Dopefiend,
How is FAT32 wasteful if it is used in a 80 GB HDD, when it can go upto 2000 GB? Can you elaborate please?
Certainly. It's all down to cluster sizes and slack space.
Let's say that you have a FAT32-formatted drive, and you want to store a 4Kb text document on that drive. The file is written to a cluster, which is a unit of storage in a filesystem. This cluster, for example, is 64Kb in size, and the file takes up 4Kb of that. This means that the remaining 60Kb is lost, or "slack space", as it cannot be used for other files.
Now let's say you have a hundred thousand 4Kb files to store. Again, they each take up 4Kb in each cluster, and 60Kb is wasted. 60Kb x 100,000 = 6Gb. That's 6Gb of space that's lost, and cannot be used for anything else.
In the same situation with NTFS, let's assume that it's using a 4Kb cluster size. The file is written, and takes up all 4Kb of space. The same 100,000 files will take up 400Mb, instead of 6.4Gb under FAT32.
Of course, storing 100,000 4Kb text documents is fairly unlikely, but it demonstrates how NTFS can scale better than FAT32, and why Microsoft would prefer people to stop using it soon. If you need to view your 2000/XP partition under Windows 9x, then you need to use FAT32, or a third-party NTFS tool to be able to see the files.
With encryption, on-the-fly compression, mount points, permissons & security, journaling and other NTFS-only features, FAT32 really isn't much of an alternative these days. NTFS is also a fair bit faster when working with extremely large directories- the time to open and display that directory of 100,000 files will be painfully long with FAT32.
However, FAT32 is a bit faster in some cases, mostly when working with video files or other large files. You will, of course, run into the 1Gb file size limitation under FAT32 though...
I hope this explains things a bit better; the reason that Microsoft have stopped Windows from formatting partitions larger than 32Gb (or is it 64Gb? I forget) is because above that size, things start to get rather wasteful indeed. Of course, you can format the partition under DOS, Linux, or something like Partition Magic, but these days, there really isn't much need for the old dog any more.