Fat / Fat32 / NTFS

[RazorWind]

Is there any difference in access time, read/write performance, .... between these different file systems, and if so which is the fastest??

 

[Bglad]

Its all in the FAQ's.

 

[RazorWind]

I already read the FAQ. What I was asking if there any was any speed differences, for example, is disk access faster on FAT32 than on NTFS or FAT??

 

[ttn1]

I doubt you will see a noticable speed difference between the different formats. Depending on your processor speed, NTFS can be either a little faster or slower. NTFS supports compressed format which can increase performance slightly with a fast enough processor.

The bottom line is that you probably won't notice much difference. I use NTFS for security reasons, but FAT32 is also pretty competent. I doubt I would use FAT anymore just because of the size limitation.

 

[ProviaFan]

I seem to remember something about FAT32 not supporting files that are larger than 2GB in size. Not absolutely sure on this though, and although I searched around a bit, I was unable to find any mention of that concern.

 

[swifty3]

ntfs is nice in the sense that it is compressed more than FAT, and gives u a little more room. i noticed when i compressed my ntfs drives though, that there was some slowdown in read/write, so maybe just have big h/d's and leave them ntfs uncompressed.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< I use NTFS for security reasons, but FAT32 is also pretty competent. >>



FAT32 is competent? That would be like using a rock for a pillow, and not a smooth nice rock...

 

[ttn1]

<< FAT32 is competent? That would be like using a rock for a pillow, and not a smooth nice rock... >>



I guess I should have qualified my statement by saying: For a microsoft file system, FAT32 is pretty competent.

Personally I prefer Ext3, but that wasn't option. It's nice to use a filesystem that doesn't fragment itself to death. I haven't found a microsoft FS yet that couldn't kill itself in a month without proper maintenance.