NTFS vs. FAT32....any advantages or disadvantages?

[travisio]

Is there any advantages or disadvantages of using NTFS or FAT32? I am running win2k on FAT32. Can someone kind of explain the 2 to me? Any information you provide is appreciated

 

[Kappo]

NTFS is more secure in that you can assign file permissions (much like unix)...so if others use your computer they cannot access the whole filing system if you dont want them to... I like it!

 

[TonyT]

Yeah, NTFS is much more secure than FAT32. If you need security with your documents, there is no contest.

 

[MGMorden]

NTFS also doesn't degrade as fast as FAT32 (ie, you shouldn't have to reinstall as often).

 

[Castellan]

In my experience, NTFS is also more efficient that fat32. Look at disk access times with the two, NTFS is almost always faster. I suppose its partly due to the indexing that takes place on an NTFS volume.

 

[Castellan]

One ohter thing. You cant access NTFS from dos (without drivers that ARE available), so if you're dual booting with 98, you'll need fat32 or fat16 for the drive space they might share.

 

[Adrian Tung]

NTFS is more reliable too. Get a blackout while you're writing to a FAT32 drive and most likely your entire partition is dead. Do that on an NTFS drive and it should be able to recover from most errors.


atwl

 

[SendTrash]

I have noticed that if you turn off your computer w/o shutting down or there is an error and the computer reboots, the partitions with FAT32 needed to be scandisked at startup, while my NTFS partitions didn't... so just for the sake of data recovery and quicker boot up after an improper shutdown makes it worth it to use NTFS.. at least for your system partition.

 

[Biggs]

You should take NTFS route.

 

[Sunner]

Lots of benefits with NTFS, most of which have been mentioned already.

The only cons IMO are that its somewhat slower, but not noticeably so unless you have a very slow comp.
And like Castellan said, if you're dual booting with some 9x, you wont be able to access the NTFS drive from 9x.

If none of the above is a big deal to you, go with NTFS.

 

[Remedy]

Q: why are the Partition sizes for NTFS so important(like i see ppl debate whether or not it should be 2,3,4 or greater) as compared to FAT32 partition? What is the size that ppl use most when Partitioning a raid 0 setup that consist of 20gigs total?(2 10gig)

 

[Sunner]

The onyl reason why that should be a big deal would be on NT4 where you cant make the boot partition bigger than 4 GB without some workarounds.
But with Win2K, there are no realistic limits, the max FS size is ~16 exabytes.

 

[Need4Speed]

NTFS is a much more intelligent file system. Lets assume you are accessing 3 pieces of data on the HDD. One at sector 5, the next at sector 30, and the final piece at sector 12. The FAT file system will read them in the order that they were requested. Thus the read head of the hard drive goes 5...to 30...and back to 12. NTFS on the other hand has the built in inteligence to say "hey 12 is before 30, so i will pick that up along the way" thus the reader goes 5..12..30. A much faster and efficient way to read the Data. Couple that with a set of nice scsi disks and you have a killer multitasking system.... ....from my previous post

 

[5mudge]

One thing to keep in mind is that you may need to replace some of your older FAT16/FAT32 disk utilities if you make the leap to NTFS. The other thing you will want to research is certain workarounds for NTFS required by some newer disk utilites (e.g. Ghost 5.1).

Good luck!

 

[hardmankam]

NTFS also offers Compression or Encryption on files or folders, not FAT32.