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When reformatting a hard drive...

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NTFS is the file system of choice for large drives. Hard drive performance has little to do with gaming speed, except load times. I doubt you would notice a difference between FAT32 and NTFS in load times.


http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1227&PHPSESSID=fd24d9ed0efa6c0f3f3b5570fa2b977b

NTFS and FAT32 are very similar in speed, but as the size of the disk increases, the gap widens. NTFS actually stores small files in the Master File Table (MFT), to increase performance. Rather than moving the heads to the beginning of the disk to read the MFT entry, and then to the middle or end of the disk to read the actual file, the heads simply move to the beginning of the disk, and read both at the same time. This can account for a considerable increase in speed when reading lots of small files.
Click to expand...

and a nice chart of the differences here.


(google is wonderful) ;)
 
The only pain is with NTFS, is that DOS doesn't recognize it at all. Since I still tend to use dos when I have a problem with a harddrive or a bootrecord. it' be nice to still recognize the drive in DOS.

Therefore I have one of my storage drives in NTFS, and i don't really see a difference.
 
Hawker-rider said:
The only pain is with NTFS, is that DOS doesn't recognize it at all. Since I still tend to use dos when I have a problem with a harddrive or a bootrecord. it' be nice to still recognize the drive in DOS.

Therefore I have one of my storage drives in NTFS, and i don't really see a difference.
Click to expand...

The XP install disk comes with a recovery console which gives you a dos-like terminal where you can access data on NTFS partitions in case of OS problems.

Also with NTFS you are much less likely to have problems like that. I have never had problems like that since switching to NTFS, but did in the past with FAT16/32. NTFS is just a much more robust file system.
 
I know about the XP recovery, but i felt it is a little limited to the commands you can give to it.

you can always convert FAt into NTFS, I'm not sure about the other way around.
 
It is not a good idea to convert FAT to NTFS, you will take a performance hit. Pick one and stick with it, if you need to change for some reason, just reformat.
 
Besides the EXCELLENT link to the comparison table, another plus for each one:

- One reason to have FAT32 over NTFS is if you have Linux in another partition. Read/write support of FAT32 is excellent but so-so with NTFS.

- Due to its larger file capacity, NTFS systems are better suited than FAT32 when editing on large video clips (like those captured from a Digital Camcorder).

So unless you are doing somthing with Unix/Linux, I would also recommend NTFS.
 
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