Couple of questions, 1/ Fat32 or NTFS, reason, from what i have read and been told over time is that NTFS is better for XP, that fat32 wont recognise large hard drives, maximum file size on fat32 4 gig, faster writing to NTFS,, but on a new computer built for me all of the above not true. it has 2x120gig hd's one internal partitioned to 2x 53 gig(dont ask where the rest is) and one 120gig external, one 53gig has operating system on it ALL are FAT32 this computer runs perfectly and takes any task put to it, so is there any reason some computers are formatted in NTFS, is there something i have not encountered yet that my file system will not handle? when xp first came out i rember being told to change to NTFS, i did until now.

http://www.comp.ro/QWFAT32_NTFS.htm http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

The main benefit, IMHO, of FAT32 is backward compatibility. If you have a machine running an older version of Windows you will not be able to create a share on an NTFS partition - unless you use 3rd party tools on the older machine. NTFS has other benefits as well such as much better security permissions you can set as well as native encryption. If you ever want to do any video editing a 4GB file size limit will not cut it. As for speed, I'm not so sure about that. I'm sure that both file types have situations where they outperform the other. Michael J

Yes there is nothing wrong with FAT32 but the difference is NTFS(new technology file system)is much better in terms of.... file names is up to 255 characters(8.3 DOS-compatible filenames). file size and partition size can be up to16 million Gbytes. A directory structure that is designed to be recoverable,NTSF can also keep tag of log on the HDD that can be rollback in the event of system failure. NTSF security features such as rights assignment and file auditing. finally it can also accomodate more blocks of data that FAT32.

i have my 80gb hard drive in my windows xp pc formatted as FAT32. Why? If PC goes wrong and I need to connect the hard disc to another PC as an emergency measure to get data, I will have option of more PCS that will detect the disc. eg. PCs with Windows 98 on (they will read a FAT32 disc but not NTFS). I know it's not that likely I will need to do that, but that's why.

One thing that wasn't mentioned is cluster size. NTFS has a fixed cluster size of 4k. FAT32 cluster size increases as the size of the partition increases. Actually, there are certain preset partition size limits that that trigger the increase from 4k to 8k, 8k to 16k, 16k to a max of 32k for partitions larger than 32GB. However, this is only true when using Microsoft's formatting tool. Also, XP will NOT format FAT32 partitons larger than 32GB, it will force you to use NTFS if you want to go larger. But if you use the HDD manufacturer's software, you can format FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB AND customize the cluster size. In other words, if you wanted an 80GB FAT32 partition w/4k cluster size, you'd be able create it using the HDD software. FAT32 is usually slightly faster than NTFS too.

"One thing that wasn't mentioned is cluster size. NTFS has a fixed cluster size of 4k." Really? When I right-click a drive and select format I am given 5 different options for allocation unit (i.e. cluster) size: - Default Allocation Size - 4096 bytes - 2048 bytes - 1042 bytes - 512 bytes Or did you mean that the max cluster size is 4k? I would think large clusters would only be useful for partitions using large file (e.g. video scratch disc) - otherwise there would be a lot of wasted space. Michael J