Should I convert to NTFS?

[fritzfield]

I have had Win XP home for a year and never had a problem. However, do I gain or lose by converting my FAT 32 drives to NTFS? I have no need for enhanced security. Any info would be helpful in my decision.

 

[Schadenfroh]

depends on how carefull you want to be about losing your files. chance something could go horribly wrong, but NTFS is FAR supperior to Fat32. You wont have to run scandisk everytime you shut down impropperly.

 

[Sunner]

Yes.

Security, encryption, compression, file size limits, and other things aside, NTFS has journaling, which greatly reduces the chances of you losing something when things go bad(that is, crash).

 

[Nothinman]

The only thing you lose is the ability to read the filesystem from non-NT based OSes.

 

[Kadarin]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
The only thing you lose is the ability to read the filesystem from non-NT based OSes.

You mean "write to" the filesystem, not read from it. The NTFS read-only driver in the linux kernel works just fine, thank you. Write support is very, very limited, but it is there.

There is also a project called Captive, which allows linux to use the actual Windows ntfs.sys NTFS driver to read/write to NTFS partitions.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea write is what I meant, sorry.

 

[fritzfield]

Thanks for the info. I did it using the convert command from a C prompt. Haven't seen anything yet that is different.