Fat32 -vs- NTFS

[JBT]

I prefer NTFS for safety/security reasons mostly. FAT32 my be a little bit faster buy certainly not 40% as one person said.

Pretty much NTFS is a better system albeit at a slight performance penalty.

 

[Auric]

Performance differences are primarily due to different default cluster sizes.

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

All I know about fat32/ntfs is when I switched from fat32 to the ntfs times were cut in half... This isn't proof of anything though since it wasn't under controlled conditions.

 

[Bassyhead]

Check this. According to it, larger volumes will benefit from NTFS and smaller volumes will benefit from FAT32.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Start backing up your data. It generally pays off in the long run. 🙂

 

[jeffredo]

Originally posted by: Bassyhead
Check <a target=new class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm">this</a>. According to it, larger volumes will benefit from NTFS and smaller volumes will benefit from FAT32.

I have to agree. I just got an old PII from work with an 8 gig harddrive. I put XP on it and used NTFS at first. It was responding very slowly, so I tested it at www.pcpitstop.com. I then reformatted it using FAT32 and tested it again. The disk performance score on their test was almost 1/3 lower using NTFS on that small drive compared to FAT32. From what I've read though, use NTFS on anything larger than 20 gigs.

 

[Brian48]

I only use NTFS for my root partitions. Everything else is FAT32. I find it's less of a headache when networking with my Linux boxes this way.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Brian48
I only use NTFS for my root partitions. Everything else is FAT32. I find it's less of a headache when networking with my Linux boxes this way.

That statement makes absolutely no sense.

 

[Brian48]

I've had issues in the past with seeing NTFS partitions over the network while under Linux. Recent distributions seem to have overcome this issue, but to insure compatibility, I keep the non-root partitions used for file sharing at Fat32. This is also necessary because I still run Win9x on a few boxes and these need to be networked as well. I don't have a choice in this regard as I need to platform test the apps we develope over a wide range of OS's.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Brian48
I've had issues in the past with seeing NTFS partitions over the network while under Linux. Recent distributions seem to have overcome this issue, but to insure compatibility, I keep the non-root partitions used for file sharing at Fat32. This is also necessary because I still run Win9x on a few boxes and these need to be networked as well. I don't have a choice in this regard as I need to platform test the apps we develope over a wide range of OS's.

The only thing that "sees" the file system is the kernel on the local machine. It has no effect on network shares over SMB (notice how Windows, which can't normally read XFS, ext[23]fs, jfs, reiserfs, etc can read samba shares?), NFS, AFE, etc. The file system plays no part, except for permissions, which is what I suspect the problem would be. 😉

It's in the FAQs somewhere, I think.

 

[Brian48]

The file system plays no part, except for permissions, which is what I suspect the problem would be.

Yeah, more than likely it is, but like I said, I still use Win9x and I still need to be able to directly access these shared partition from these older machines. In any case, I've never had a problem with Fat32 so I've never bothered to completely divorce myself from it.

 

[Markfw]

If you are runnnng Windows 2000 or Windows XP, you can "see" either fat32 (or fat) or NTFS partitions.

If you are running Windows 98 you can only "see" fat32 or fat partitions (except when using parition magic or something, they can still see the NTFS partition(s) when running under 98)

Other than that, its all about permissions. Also, any partition you current OS can see, another networked PC can see if the right permissions are given. So if one box has XP and NTFS partitions, and grants all access to the network (all users for example) and a Windows98 box using fat32 looks over the network at the XP box, it can "see" the NTFS partition, as the XP box is sending the info back to it.

 

[Brian48]

Actually, you're right. Now that I've smacked my head a bit. I was thinking more in terms of dual-boot scenarios where I needed to access a partition on the same physical drive. 😱 This is what you get when working with a hodge-podge of OSs you don't really care about.

 

[caz67]

NTFS, all the way

 

[0roo0roo]

i'm used to using normal dos bootdiscs and norton ghost. so fat32 for me. normal bootdiscs cant see ntsf😛

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
i'm used to using normal dos bootdiscs and norton ghost. so fat32 for me. normal bootdiscs cant see ntsf😛

Sysinternals.... NTFSDOS. The free one can read, the $ one can write. Covered it before, but Bart's PE should give you access.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Ghost and PowerQuest really only care about partitions, so you only need to see the partition table. PQ does have some apps that will run in the WinPE space.

 

[0roo0roo]

heh interesting, but still more painful then fat32🙂

 

[RobCur]

Originally posted by: JBT
I prefer NTFS for safety/security reasons mostly. FAT32 my be a little bit faster buy certainly not 40% as one person said.

Pretty much NTFS is a better system albeit at a slight performance penalty.

NTFS is 40 percent faster maybe even 50, but whatever the heck it is certainly makes a difference.
FAT32 is for compatibiity with win9x,ME,95,DOS but is sure inferior.

 

[sunase]

Last set of benchmarks I saw FAT32 easily beat NTFS. Considering NTFS has journaling to do this is hardly surprising, but it also has other areas where it incurs overhead, and generally people use smaller cluster sizes with NTFS as well.

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: sunase
Last set of benchmarks I saw FAT32 easily beat NTFS. Considering NTFS has journaling to do this is hardly surprising, but it also has other areas where it incurs overhead, and generally people use smaller cluster sizes with NTFS as well.

The last benchmark I saw had NTFS slightly slower. BUT, the drives were only 4GB and files were much smaller. Since FAT32 cannot handle the file sizes I deal with in video editing, it is not even a contest. 4GB is the max file size. I now handle files that are regularly more than 8GB. When High Def arrives in my NLE suite, I expect to see files in the 25-50GB range. FAT32 is dead for me.

As a footnote, I am using larger cluster sizes to compensate for the big blocks of data. I do not have lots of small files, but lots of big files. Therefore, the larger clusters tend to be more efficient.

 

[Gamingphreek]

Isn't a new "version" per se of NTFS coming out with Longhorn.

-Kevin

 

[Mem]

Ok, Now that I've waded through all the back and forth talk about Fat32 -v- NTFS. I should have renamed the header. LOL.

Hehe......anyway I`ll make it simple for those that have not read every post ,use NTFS.

🙂