Hi,
In addition to providing the functional structure through which basic NT / W2K security is enabled, NTFS also provides:
1. a greater degree of control over the size of clusters, allowing you to tailor cluster size on a partition to optimize it for its intended use
2. the capability of providing for transparent (to the authorized user, but to no one else) encryption of drives / folders / files (I know this is part of security, but it's a capability that extends far beyond the normal access permissions in its power.)
3. a provision for transparent data compression, not usually a big deal these days considering the drive capacities available, but useful at times, nonetheless
4. a far more robust file system than FAT or FAT32, with journaling and redundant information stores for the system's data ABOUT the files (It also keeps a far more comprehensive set of data about each file.)
5. less degradation of performance due to file fragmentation than that experienced by FAT systems, though defragging is still highly recommended
The only downer I can think of for it is that it does require a lot more system overhead to use than FAT, both from the standpoint of processing power and hard drive space. If you keep more data pertaining to the files, you have to read more data pertaining to the files. However, there is partial compensation for this overhead in terms of processor power because of the more efficient search algorithms used by NTFS. And there is partial compensation for the use of extra disk space in the fact that the file system is so much more protected from data losses.
In general, the larger the partitions and the more files you have, the more efficient NTFS becomes in comparison to FAT and FAT32.
What programs do you have that don't run on NTFS? The only issues I've heard of were installation programs that tried to deduce available space by some method that was fooled by the file system structure. I think all of those types of difficulties can be overcome using the APCOMPAT.EXE utility, but I've never actually run into a program that actually had this problem. (And I support some people who use TONS of legacy crap.)
Oh, and it is possible to convert a partition back from NTFS to FAT32 without reformatting. Utilities like Partition Magic (latest version ONLY if you're going to use it with W2K) can do this trick. HOWEVER, if you have anything on the partition (or any part of the same physical drive, for that matter) that is not backed up, you should back it up to external media before you do this type of conversion. I avoid using third party partition utilities like the plague, but I've had to rescue (or try to rescue) any number of people who've been bitten when using these utilities. Whether the problem was with the utilities or with the users is a moot point. Either the utility was at fault or, at the least, it certainly didn't do much of a job of protecting the user from himself. When there's a failure of the process, however rare the failures may be, it farkles the hard drive BUT GOOD! I saw two drives that we decided not to even try to recover ourselves because of the critical nature of the data on them. (Client was an idiot. Business was totally dependent on the data, and he had no backups, and he was just screwing around with PM to "see what it could do". DOH!) We sent the drives to two different specialty data recovery services, and got around 25% of the data back. That, as anyone in the data recovery business would tell you, means that the drives were well and truly farkled. One of the data recovery guys said that he had never seen data so badly manged on a drive that was physically intact. He had to disassemble the drives to recover the portion of the data that could be recovered.
Hope this is helpful.
Regards,
Jim