NTFS or FAT>?

SteTheDudeSteTheDude Rochdale, England!
edited October 2003 in Hardware
Does anyone here use NTFS? or is it just me who isnt using it?

Was wondering if there is much difference in the two, I know NTFS is suppose to be better but why?

Comments

  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Security, and now speed.

    Probably 95% of people using Windows 2000, XP and S2k3 are using NTFS for those reasons.

    Due to journling it is faster, and it is more likely to survive through bad shutdowns.

    Not sure on the specifics at all, but in short, NTFS is better.
    Also try it on Pen drives, it makes them phenominally faster.

    NS
  • SteTheDudeSteTheDude Rochdale, England!
    edited October 2003
    cheers for the pen drive tip, gonna experiement now...

    For normal harddrives they need to be formatted in NTFS dont they? you cant simply "upgrade" the file system?
  • stoopidstoopid Albany, NY New
    edited October 2003
    Originally posted by NightShade737
    Also try it on Pen drives, it makes them phenominally faster.

    Neat trick :)
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Try searching or copying files. The speed it goes through with FAT is almost 1 file a second, but with NTFS it seems to be as fast as a Hard-Drive, which is ace tbh.

    You may need to do it from the command line as you cant format small drives to NTFS.

    Use -

    convert /fs:NTFS X:

    where X is the drive letter.

    NS
  • Red-SquirrelRed-Squirrel Ontario, Canada
    edited October 2003
    I used NTFS on my C drive (win2kpro) and FAT32 on my D drive, which is where I put all my stuff.

    The main advantages of NTFS are

    -speed and security, like mentioned
    - cluster size.

    NTFS has a fixed size of 4KB I believe, while fat32 can be anywhere from 512bytes (RARE!) to 32KB, all depending on the size of the drive. I have an article on my site that goes more into details on how this is calculated.

    But the advantage of FAT32 over NTFS is that if your operating system is caput, can't boot, at least you can still access the files through DOS. So if you have a dying hard drive and you want to copy everything you can ASAP and can't boot in the OS, at least you can access the FAT16/32 partitions in dos, while you can't access NTFS.

    It's one of the reasons I never bothered converting the D drive to NTFS.

    But it takes bloody ages to defrag compare to the C drive. Then again, I have 18GB of stuff in there scattered all over the place with 2GB gabs in between etc... I do alot of work involving large files such as video.
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited October 2003
    ntfs does not have a fixed cluster size??? You can format it with a wider variety of cluster sizes then fat32 as your not limited to certain clusters sizes based on drive size.

    And there are a variety of free software utilities to that allow you to copy files off a ntfs drive from a dos boot disk. email me And I'll send you dos boot disk that boots into a nifty utility that allows you read only access to all your ntfs files.

    There is really NO reason anymore not to use ntfs unless you dual boot with win98 or something and thats a bad habit you got to break anyway.

    NTFS is a hundred times more stable and just as fast basicaly.

    If you run XP or Win2k then you SHOULD be running ntfs.

    Tex
  • SteTheDudeSteTheDude Rochdale, England!
    edited October 2003
    ive got win XP but have my drives set to FAT 32, is there a way I can convert without re-formatting? or is that the only way?
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Originally posted by SteTheDude
    ive got win XP but have my drives set to FAT 32, is there a way I can convert without re-formatting? or is that the only way?

    You need to use something like Partition Magic and just tell it to convert it. Windows has a built in lossless converter, but you cant convert your current running Windows partition, so you would have to put the drive in another machine to be able to use the built in NTFS converter (but PM would be fine).

    NTFS supports cluster sizes from 512bytes to 64Kbytes, no idea where you got that fixed cluster size idea from.

    You CAN access NTFS drives from DOS using a small program.

    NS
  • Red-SquirrelRed-Squirrel Ontario, Canada
    edited October 2003
    I meant it's impossible using windows alone, sure there's probably many third party utilities out there to access it. There's even some that will read the drive in raw form. Can be handy for recovering lost files and such.

    As for the fixed size I was not 100% sure on that one, but 4KB seems to be what they default it at if you don't specify a size, as all the ntfs partitions I've worked with have always been 4KB.

    To check this create a 1 byte file (text file, whatever) and check the properties for "size on disk".

    But yes, NTFS is much better then FAT32. I was doing experiments/calculations and FAT32 actually supports up to 8TB, while most people say 2TB, but the reason most people say 2 is because having a FAT32 drive at 8TB would most likely crash a system just because of the FAT size not fitting in the ram. I forget how big it would be but I think it's in the GB range. NTFS supports a much larger capacity, while staying efficient even at large sizes. But when we get into TB ranges, we're most likely talking about mainframes and high end scsi raids, as the biggest desktop drive now is 180GB I think... but they seem to grow so fast they might be higher now.
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