I need your advice guys, FAT32 or NTFS?

[Edman]

I have decided to keept with Win2K (Before I was deciding btwn WinMe and Win2K), so my question is this:

I currently are using FAT32 in all my partitions, but I already have convert almost all to NTFS, with the exception of my prymary partition (OS), the Apps partiotion and the games partition, all this 'cause I tough that if I convert the remaining units to NFTS my system gonna be slower, so what you think?

NTFS or FAT32?

 

[sun818]

NTFS is actually much better than FAT32 in terms of performance and security. Only reason you would want a FAT32 partition is if you want to file share with a Win95 OSR2 or Win98 machine. When I converted my full 2GB system drive from FAT32 to NTFS, I picked up an addition 700 megs this way. Pretty neat!

Here is a break down of what partition is compatible with different versions:

Windows 95 : FAT16
Windows 95 OSR2 : FAT16, FAT32
Windows 98 : FAT16, FAT32
Windows NT : FAT16, NTFS
Windows 2000 : FAT16, FAT32, NTFS

 

[Edman]

Thanks sun818!!

 

[sun818]

No problem!

 

[AfterBurn]

For future reference: NTFS performs best when setup at installation. Its not much, but it holds some advantage over a FAT(32) partition that is converted to NTFS as certain filesystem features cant be 100% optimal due to conversion 'legacy'.

 

[Looney]

Definitely NTFS... especially the ease and power of the security features.

 

[Rigoletto]

what security features? Can someone enlighten me? I heard of them but never saw them.

 

[Mark R]

Security features such as user-level control over directories and files:

You can disallow change/delete access to the Windows directory to all users except administrators - this makes it quite difficult to damage the OS unless you are logged on as administrator.

You can protect personal files on a shared computer - give every user a seperate login. Their home directories can then be set up to allow access only to their user ID.

There are other advanced features too, such as file-by-file compression (not much use on modern large drives) or file-by-file encryption (to prevent retrieval of sensitive documents if a vandal resorts to using a raw disk reading program).

NTFS is also more fault tolerant than FAT:

A power failure or crash during a save operation may irretrievably corrupt a FAT partition, whereas an NTFS partition will survive with only the file in question being corrupted.

A bad sector in the FAT of a FAT partition is terminal. NTFS keeps a backup copy of the master file tables physically well away from the master copy so that it can recover.

 

[rfan622]

jus a similar related questions what is the difference between Dynamic FAT32 partition and a non-dynamic FAT32 partition, this is in WIN2k.. Thanks

-rfan622

 

[Chuck]

Interesting. When Win2k first came out I remember an article saying that NTFS was slower. Mabey it was a beta copy or something.

Out of interest, kinda going off on a tangent about what Mark R was saying, does everyone have their main user account in Win2k setup to be an equivelent administrator? I did this because I thought it was the most sensible thing to do (standalone machine, with just me as the user, and no important things to hide from other people). But i've heard a lot of people make paralells with loging on as root all the time in Linux (something that I full well know I shouldn't do -- I accidentally deleted /usr once ).

Comments?

 

[bkdiem2]

Well here is a first hand, and very recent, account of why TO upgrade to NTFS..

I just spent like 12 hours recovering all my data from a 30 GB hard drive that was almost full. I think I lost about 28G worth of MP3s

I thought there was a hardware failure, but as it turns out the FAT table had somehow become corrupt. any way its all back, fully restored and now running fine on the same drive currently formatted with NTFS.

Prior to switching over to NTFS I was having roblems with a really slow start up. win2k would hang for almost a minute durring the initial splash screen, but finally come up a minute or so later. I assumed it had to do with an inncorrect setting in the bios or whatever. after the conversion to NTFS the system starts up almost 4 times as fast. I'm in theprocess of converting all the drives.

go NTFS

-b

by the way.. after spending almost 8 hours recovering the data.. after switching the drive to ntfs, all my data was there. I didn't need the back up.

 

[bkdiem2]

additionally after spending much time searching for backup/recovery software for win2000 I located this product which worked really well, and it works through windows instead of DOS like most other recovery programs...

Ontrack - Easy Recovery Pro 5.0

I had a terrible time with Power Quest's "Lost and Found"

-b

 

[Edman]

Thanks for all your answers folks, in concern what chuck mentions in his post, I have read that article too, but in that case the "indexing service" was running on that machines, and that's why it (NTFS) was slower in that especific case.

So my personal recomendation, keep indexing service disabled.

 

[Chuck]

Out of interest what does indexing do? Is it like (I mean 'like' in the most general sence) that MS Office '95 FastFind thing?

 

[urbantechie]

NTFS. Fragmentation is much lower compared to FAT32.

 

[rnimz]

Can ME read NTFS? I am sure it can't run on a NTFS partition, but can it read one?

 

[Edman]

Sorry rnimz, but WinMe cannot read any NTFS partition.

And chuck about the indexing service is something similar to find fast.