NTFS vs. Fat32

[RickD]

Hello,
Which format is better, I\'m upgrading my PC with a clean install. Is NTFS better than Fat32?

Thanks!

Rick

[marcuspocus]

Agreed totally....

[BlueNote]

The only reason for sticking with FAT32 would be if you need access to your partitions from Win 9x, DOS or anything like that. If not, NTFS is what you want to use.

Just make sure that you format the drives with \"large\" cluster sizes (I would recomend 32K for your \"system\" drive, and 64K for audio/samples)

[Hans Adamson]

Will drives formatted as FAT32 be accessible when I switch to WinXP?

Hans

[13erla]

fat 32 drives are accessible by all windows systems....however ntfs is only accessible to win 2k and xp systems.

the best bet is ntfs as long as ur not planning on using win98 or anything before 2k.

ntfs offers you a much higher security as well as better stability.

really the real answer for any giga system i\'ve found is to run xp pro with ntfs on all drives.

[Bill]

\"ntfs is only accessible to win 2k and xp systems\"

But IS accessible over a network.

[Arch Stanton]

Hey Bill,

So that means an XP PC with NTFS and a W98 PC using FAT32 can still swap files over a lan network? Is there any slowdown in file transfers due to the different systems?

regards,
Arch

[Bill]

I don’t think these any appreciable slowdown. After all, this is the standard setup with an office file server running NT/2000, and all the workstations running Win95/98.

[SOD213]

I come from a technical background.

Word of caution against NTFS.. it\'s a BITCH removing viruses from and doing data recovery on. I run NTFS on only one of my drives, I use it because I need to store video files that are larger than 4GB (FAT32\'s limit.)

Security.. who needs it? Seriously, I doubt that you\'re running Giga on a network that has multiple users. (Or even on a computer with multiple users. Like you\'d let ANYONE touch your music computer. images/icons/smile.gif )

Stability? I\'ve seen NTFS cause more problems than FAT32. If you get a hard systemlock when NTFS is doing a write, you can get a corrupted drive. No thanks.

Only option? Format the drive using Partition Magic. Or Aefdisk (free). I use a Ghost image of a blank FAT32 drive. It fits on a floppy along with Ghost, and takes 5 seconds to \"format\" the drive as FAT32. Works on anything up to 137GB. Yes, I\'m aware of XP\'s refusal to make a FAT32 drive larger than 32GB upon install, but it has no qualms installing on a 120GB drive preformatted as FAT32.

I\'ve also seen statistics about FAT32 vs NTFS regarding speed, and from what I\'ve read, audio PC\'s benefit more from FAT32.