im going back FAT32

[Twista]

No, im not dumb well maybe but not with this idea. Why? Heres why i think i got why my pc is slow with windows xp and it seems your only suppose to run NTFS with a drive bigger than 32gb and i have a 30gb which formats to 27gb! I hope this fixes my slow xp and yes its slow on a clean install, pus im putting my swap on a fat16 drive because:



Although FAT16 is an old file system and its partition has the maximum size of 2 gb, it´s much more faster than FAT32 or NTFS. So, you put your Windows Swap file there and you gonna have a better perfomance. If you receive a message that the partition of the windows swap file is full, then reduce the file size in 100 mb and it´ll be fine. It´s relevant to say that you must have at least a 100 mb swap file in your main partition . So i be back on a freshly xp FAT32 and guess what this os is only like 3 days old and its slower man i gotta figure this out!

 

[Twista]

back and im on fat32 nowz.

 

[Jonitus]

How do you define slow?

Wherever you read that NTFS is suitable only for drives >30 GB is wrong. NTFS is fine (and fast) on a 6GB drive in my system right now.

Use NTFS for the whole drive. Stay away from FAT16 for your page file. FAT16 is old and slow, that's why it's not used anymore. Do a fresh install with the entire drive formatted NTFS. Regularly defragment, and be done with it.

Are you sure that you have UDMA enabled for the drive? If not, it would be slow as hell.

If you have UDMA enabled on your drive, and the drive is formatted properly and regularly maintained, your system should access data fast. If you need more speed than what you will get by actually doing the suggested, might I point you to a 15k SCSI setup?

Punctuation...learn it, love it, use it.

 

[Need4Speed]

there shouldnt be a noticable diff in speed between fat32 and ntfs. ntfs does carry a bit more overhead, but there is no reason why someone now days should need to run fat32 unless your dual booting and need the fat compatibility. ntfs is much more robust, doesnt defrag as quickly, etc.

 

[Twista]

oh well im fat32 now and i will report later back. Slow= slow accessing my programs like opening IE from the quick launch could take 8sec while in windows 2000 it took a matter of seconds not even 8 and when i boot up into xp half of the taskbar is not showed but than after everything is loaded the screen is there. I have the ram and speed and dma and ram is right and strange thing windows 2003 and 2000 pro runs so better on here than clamsy xp with everything disabled in services. So i will try this out and will have half my PF on the os hdd and the another part on the slave. Yes, i have a 7200rpm 2 mb matrox not even 2 months old.

//If you still dont see i guess the only way is for people to see my system in person and see if its slower than your xp and it will be sluggish and its on classic mode. Games run just fine fps are fine, for example in quake3 i can get over 200 fine and RCTW ET i got good fps over 60fps so i will guess my system is fine with ntfs and games but windows mode suck a$$.

 

[owensdj]

If Windows XP is running slower than it should, it's not because of using NTFS.

 

[Twista]

Originally posted by: owensdj
If Windows XP is running slower than it should, it's not because of using NTFS.

dont ask me why but my IE is launching way faster than ntfs fresh install with chipset drivers and everything. Im going with what MS says about 30gb and i think there right about the 32gb and above and what so so so about the limitations.

//When i say :IE: i should just say about every program this is what i brought a 7200rpm which didnt change anything much but it did up my pc mark scores.


oh well! i be back on later on today.

 

[Nothinman]

Although FAT16 is an old file system and its partition has the maximum size of 2 gb, it´s much more faster than FAT32 or NTFS. So, you put your Windows Swap file there and you gonna have a better perfomance.

FAT16 is only fast becuase the partition size is so small, might as well make 15 2G partitions on your 30G drive then, right? It'll be a lot faster that way.

And if you're paging to disk enough that you notice, spend a little cash and get some memory, it's not exactly expensive.

If you receive a message that the partition of the windows swap file is full, then reduce the file size in 100 mb and it´ll be fine.

Of course, Windows complains that it needs more pagefile space so you just make it smaller that's logical...

Im going with what MS says about 30gb and i think there right about the 32gb and above and what so so so about the limitations.

I'm sure MS picked that number almost arbitrarily. Smaller disks don't lose performance with NTFS, although the percentage of space consumed by the MFT is larger.

 

[Jolt2]

Are you are using a Maxtor drive? Did you use the MaxBlast utility that came with the Maxtor drive to set up your hard drive?

I have had trouble with my drive when I used the Max Blast program to setup it up. I would get the same symptoms that you are having; slow file access, slower than normal booting. I went from a 2Mb drive to a 8Mb drive and did not see any difference in speed. It even may have been a little slower and I thought I just wasted my money on this 8Mb drive. Later, when I ran Partition Magic on the hard drive to move a partition, Partition Magic would not run and gave me an error message about my drive. So I thought that I should get it backed up before I start playing with it to try and get the speed back. Then I found that I also could not run Drive Image on the new drive too, so I could not back it up. I still had the old drive so I was safe with that but I had the wipe the new drive over with Partition Magic, setup new partitions and format the drive using Partition Magic. The key here is dumping the partitions and starting over. I then copied my files over to the new drive using the program xxcopy. This is Windows98 so using that program was not a problem. After I was done, the new hard drive was fast and what I had been looking for when I bought the drive. The speed was now there and I believe that the Max Blast software was to blame. This was with a fat32 format and the Max Blast software did something that was not standard for the a MS partition. The drive booted and worked with no obvious problems except for being slow and the above programs not running.

 

[spyordie007]

If you want to blame your problems on the file system than go right ahead, in all reality with a Windows XP system drive on NTFS it should be comperable or faster than FAT32 in everything except for a handfull of artificial benchmarks. If you create a sepereate partition for the pagefile it is going to be a little faster in that it wont get as fragmented (not that it matters if it gets fragmented, there are defraggers that will fix that as well), and of course if the partition is at the front of the drive it is going to be faster than the end of the drive, but you knew that already right? And of course like was mentioned if you are really that concerned with the speed of the pagefile just get some more RAM so that the pagfile's usage remains low.

Im going with what MS says about 30gb and i think there right about the 32gb and above and what so so so about the limitations.

The only thing that Microsoft "says" about 30GB is that they suggest that 30GB is the largest size partition that FAT32 should run on (it will of course use a larger drive fine, it will just accumulate more "slack"). They have never said that NTFS is anything less than ideal for drives under 30GB, in fact I seem to recall (and this was only a couple of years ago) how much more I enjoyed using NTFS on my Windows NT4 box's 1.5GB drive than FAT(16)...

I'm sorry to hear you have had a few problems, none of them sound like they have anything to do with which file system you are running.

 

[Nothinman]

If you create a sepereate partition for the pagefile it is going to be a little faster in that it wont get as fragmented (not that it matters if it gets fragmented, there are defraggers that will fix that as well),

A fragmented pagefile doesn't hurt performance because it's accessed in page size chunks (4K on 32-bit machines) and very rarely does it need more than a page or two at a time, especially sequentially.

and of course if the partition is at the front of the drive it is going to be faster than the end of the drive, but you knew that already right?

This won't make a difference either, because since the pagefile is only accessed in page sized chunks the throughput advantages that the beginning of the drive has are irrelevant. Infact putting it on it's own partition at the beginning of the drive will probably hurt performance because it'll increase seek time whenever a page is needed. Ideally you want it right in the middle of the drive to minimize seek time.

 

[spyordie007]

Unless you dont have enough RAM and it's paging a large number of chunks to/from the drive in place of RAM, but of course the obvious solution is to have enough physical RAM for your running applications so this doesnt occur.

 

[Nothinman]

Even if is paging out by the Meg, most likely the pages aren't in any specific order and when it goes to page them back in it'll be jumping around randomly in the pagefile, not streaming pages sequentially, so seek time is still the main factor.

 

[ProviaFan]

I am certain that NTFS was not to blame for your slow applications. Something else that had gotten on your system was at fault (spyware or a virus-like program, probably). If you would have reinstalled with NTFS, your system would be just as fast, if not slightly faster (though it wouldn't be noticable), than with FAT32.

IMHO, this thread has been useful after all, because I've learned some new stuff about the page file. Thanks guys. 🙂