FAT32 Vs NTFS

[Claymen 0]

Okay to all who have been talking about which is better FAT32 or NTFS i have found that they are very similair and what one lacks the other makes up for.

 

First is my PC Specs

P3-500Mhz Geniune Intel

Seagate UATA/66 8.4gb

Quantum Fireball UATA/66 17gb

64Mb SDRAM PC-100

 

Okay i have run windows 2k on a FAT32 partition for over 4 months and just a couple days ago i decided i wanted some more security so i formated my dual booting win2k/win98 system to the following

 

DISK1 8.4gb

Primary - Win2k - 3gb

Primary - Win98 - 1gb

Logical - 4.4gb

- Games - 4.4gb

 

DISK2 17gb

Logical - 17gb

- Files - 17gb

 

Now as i have run it for a couple days now it seems to me that NTFS is much faster over FAT32 when running Win2k. And the security helped a bit aswell. So what im saying is in my experience NTFS is a good file system if you want speed and security. FAT32 has speed almost as fast as NTFS but doesnt have the security. Its up to you whether you spend your time reformatin to get NTFS if you really want security. Just leave it as FAT32 if you dont care about file security

 

_____________________

:-) Claymen claymen@cyberdude.com

[clutch 1]

Or you can just convert your existing partition to NTFS and not lose any data.

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[DosFreak 2]

Before anyone asks to convert your partitions to NTFS.

 

1. Go to a dos box.

2. Type in: Convert X: /FS:NTFS /V

Where X=drive letter

You may have ti rebiit and conversion takes very little time.

[clutch 1]

Oh yeah, sorry about that. Hate to give hints and not ideas . Do we have a faq here? Is there a way we can setup one with answers to repeated questions? I know that the search function has behaved oddly to me in the past and it may be hard to find the answer to a question you didn't know you had. I use this one the most:

www.ntfaq.com

 

for most of the odd things I need (i.e. using NT policies on Win2K boxes or funky registry settings) I can find them here. I just thought that maybe we could contribute to a one-stop shopping place for info.

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[Reidyn 0]

I wouldn't go so far as to say that NTFS and FAT32 are similar. I won't dive into the technical details of why they are completely different. NTFS is much more robust than FAT32, and beyond filesystem-level security it also supports filesystem-level encryption and filesystem-level compression. It's much more efficient about disk usage than FAT32 (where cluster sizes get rather large as you approach large partition sizes).

 

The added robustness is reason in itself to choose NTFS if at all possible. When WON'T you use NTFS?

 

(1) If you need a partition to be visible to a Win9x installation on a multi-boot system

(2) If you really want to be able to get in with a boot floppy to fix things, you'll put the OS only on a small (1GB) FAT32 partition and format the rest as a working partition with NTFS. This is really not necessary with Windows 2000 because it offers a "safe mode boot" that Windows NT didn't have.

[clutch 1]

You can also use Erdcommander to boot a WinNT system using NTFS with a floppy. This link shows how it's done and has links for the software.

http://www.ntfaq.com/ntfaq/util14.html

 

 

 

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Regards,

 

clutch

[@M 0]

NTFS is definitely superior to FAT32:

It can compress or encrypt data on the fly

and also uses journaling to my experience;

so if your system crashes (hello OC´s) there´s only minimal loss in data;