I am running WinXP on a 60gb IDE drive. Which filesystem would give me overall faster performance (disk access, speed, etc): FAT32 or NTFS? I'm using FAT32 right now and don't know if I should convert. Are the benefits substantial? And if I do convert the disk, will the partition be "dirty" or degraded because I didn't format using NTFS and install clean?

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i had a dual boot system with both and ntfs was defenitely faster in my opinion

i disagree... going by the sandra file system benchmark: i have a western digital raptor serial ata hard drive and my score under fat 32 was 40,000, after converting to ntfs it went down 25% to 30,000......i then fdisk/reformatted to get fat32 back and i gained 1,000 points to bring me up to 41,000 check disk and defrag took longer, also in my opinion, ntfs decreases performance...it may be good in other areas, though