I installed Win XP Pro (new installation) on an old Maxtor 30 GB ATA 66 harddrive formatted as a single FAT32 partition with a bunch of applications and decided to run a quick benchmark with Fresh Diagnose, a system information and benchmarking tool that I like. The link is at ... http://www.snapfiles.com/get/freshdiagnose.html It reported a respectable 17.84 MB/sec write speed and 25.83 MB/sec read speed. Then I converted to a single NTFS partition and ran Fresh Diagnose again. The results reported were a somewhat lower 14.36 MB/sec write speed, and a much lower 10.96 MB/sec read speed. After reading that NTFS is faster FAT32, I'm wondering??? Should the decline have been so much; particularly with the read speed? And why is the read speed now less than write speed? Shouldn't a drive be able to read faster than write? The system however, IS very stable. Any thoughts much appreciated. Sandor

Sorry; by accident this ended up here; I would like to repost on XP forum.