NTFS or FAT32?

[touser]

hi all i currently have my win2k system on an ntfs partition but i hear that a fat32 partition is faster then ntfs in windows 2000?! is this true? if so i have a format to do! if not then great :)

[RedDeathDrinker]

Yes, FAT32 is "faster" than NTFS, but unfortunately, you have to re-partition your hard drive, and re-install your OS.

[touser]

thank you reddeathdrinker but if fat32 is indeed fater then ntfs then what is the reason for ntfs in the 1st place? does it have some better form of security?

[RedDeathDrinker]

No real advantage there I'm afraid. FAT32 is the most widely used and is pretty efficent. Just like there's Windows, there are other operating systems out there (BeOS, Linux, MacOS etc) which do a similar job, yet are less popular. NTFS is just another way of doing it....

[Violator]

em hate to jump in here but there are several reasons for using NTFS.

Microsoft's implementation goal for NTFS was to overcome the limitations of the other two NT-compatible file systems and provide the advanced features that an enterprise-level operating system requires. For example, NTFS supports file and directory-granular security, whereas FAT and HPFS have no security capability. In addition, NTFS's allocation scheme can efficiently address huge disks—FAT and HPFS both are limited to disk sizes. Finally, of the three file systems, NTFS is the only one that's Unicode-enabled for international environments and has built-in data reliability features to prevent file and file system corruption if the system fails.

In addition :

With only 65,536 clusters of addressing capability, a FAT drive with 1KB clusters can cover a 65MB disk. Today's 4GB or larger disks require FAT clusters of 64KB—a size that typically yields large amounts of wasted space. In contrast, NTFS references clusters with 64-bit addresses. Thus, even with 512-byte clusters, NTFS can map disks up to sizes that we won't likely see even in the next few decades.


FAT32 is not terribly efficient, although it is certainly more so than FAT16, NTFS and FAT32 are quite different and should not really be compared to one another.


just my 2p.......

[RedDeathDrinker]

Whoa! Who's been reading M$ technical manuals again?????

Technically, a very proficent answer.

In English, NTFS manages the diskspace better?

[Violator]

Basically, NTFS offers file security and support for larger disks

:)

It is also completely unreadable by DOS, which can only be a good thing.............

[RedDeathDrinker]

I see...........

[SickBoy]

NTFS can support a maximum of a 4 exabyte disk... to give you an idea how big that is, it's estimated that every word a human has said from the beginning of time until now in a .txt file would take up a little less than 1 exabyte.....

SickBoy

[[Oc]acaridans]

Originally posted by reddeathdrinker


In English, NTFS manages the diskspace better?

Yes its more efficent that FAT, it can use disk space better with less waste..

putting it simply,
your harddrive is made up of blocks, each block can hold, we'll say 100k for simplicity reasons...now each block can only have 1 file in it at a time, say you save a 101k file you have to use 2 blocks but the 99k that is left over in the second block is now lost. What NTFS does is make the blocks much smaller say 25k creating less space, that 101k file needs 5 blocks now but only loses 24k. It does this as well as doing everything else that Violator has already said.