NTFS Performance

[jwl812 0]

NTFS under XP is jackin' my system up!!!!!!!!! File access is incredibly slow. Programs take forever to start up. The harddisk is banging around constantly. FAT32 seemed much much faster. Also 3d framerates have suffered. Is NTFS better or just hype. It may be more secure but its definitly slower.

[Admiral LSD 0]

Yep, you do take a performance hit under NTFS but IMO it's well worth it. After being able to recover nearly all my files (only one wouldn't recover and that wasn't the fault of NTFS but rather the fact that WinTernals Disk Commander appears to have issues with filenames that have Unicode charatcters in them. Other programs would have recovered it just fine.) after a partition table meltdown (and possibly further damage to that area of the disk) I have utmost faith in NTFS ability to keep my data safe and as such will never even think about using FAT.

[Sampson 0]

Perhaps, it is time to defrag that hard drive.

[Admiral LSD 0]

Diskeeper is available for a 30-day trial:

 

http://www.executivesoftware.com/trialware/diskeeper/download.asp

 

It's not the best defragger in the world but since you only have like 2 other alternatives when it comes to NTFS defragmentation tools it not too bad.

[Dirty Harry 0]

OK, I'm a FAT32 fan and wouldn't put NTFS on any of my private systems, corporate stuff is another story. Still, I've never heard that NTFS would really give anyone a noticeable performance hit. It isn't faster, its slower, but it isn't really that much slower.

 

In short, I doubt that your trouble is because of NTFS, but unless you are running on big corporate networks, run huge files etc stay with FAT32.

 

H.

[CyberGenX 0]

NTFS is actually more robust than FAT32 and also FAT32 has the 4GIG file size limit as NTFS does not. I never saw any performance difference.

[Julian Mehnle 0]

O&O Defrag is the best defragger I have ever used. Diskeeper is shitty bloatware compared to it.

 

There's a trial version and even a freeware version (with less features though).

[DosFreak 2]

Try VoptNT/XP.

[Admiral LSD 0]

Quote:

O&O Defrag is the best defragger I have ever used. Diskeeper is shitty bloatware compared to it.

There's a trial version and even a freeware version (with less features though).

I tried O&O Defrag (the trial if that means anything) once and it sucked. Nearly every NTFS defragger sucks in one way or another. What I want is a program that works like Nortons Speed Disk (the 9x version, the NT version sucked balls).

And Dirty Harry: How can you trust your data to a Filesystem that was originally designed for floppy disks? You only have to look sideways at a FAT volume to generate half a dozen lost chains and goodness knows what else.

[Champion_R 0]

I've lost files on FAT32 before. I changed to NTFS and had no probs since. I also have a mate who lost a Diablo II character using FAT32. Boy was he pissed, He uses NTFS now.

[Julian Mehnle 0]

Quote:

What I want is a program that works like Nortons Speed Disk (the 9x version, the NT version sucked balls).

What do you mean, i.e. what features are you missing?

[hardtofin 0]

correct me if im wong. but i think once u get over the 4gig that is fat32's limit. ntfs claws back its performance and is actually fater than fat32. im a hardcore win2k pro man with ALL ntfs partitions. i hate 9x and anything to do with it. and hence avoid it like the plague. i thought only noobs used fat32 still.

 

hardtofin

[Julian Mehnle 0]

Quote:

correct me if im wong. but i think once u get over the 4gig that is fat32's limit.

You can create partitions much larger than 4GB with FAT32 without noticable performance degradation. The problem with FAT32 is that it can't handle files larger than 4GB at all. NTFS can.

[Brian Frank 0]

From my experience, NTFS vs. FAT32 isn't noticeable. I used to run all FAT32 drives when I started using Win2k. I slowly migrated to NTFS on all of my partitions, and I cannot tell you the speed difference for the life of me. Benchmarks may say one thing--and while they are neat to compare, they don't tell you if you'll notice the difference, and in most cases you don't. NTFS is better than FAT32 by a long shot. The only time you really even need FAT32 on an NT-based system is if you're doing a dual-boot with any OS that doesn't read NTFS (Win9x, older distros of Linux--so I'm told anyway).

[Admiral LSD 0]

Linux still only has read-only support for NTFS. Write support is still coming (it's been that way for something like 3 years...), or so I believe.

 

I've been using NTFS for all my NT partitions ever since I started using NT over 3 years ago. I saw no logical reason to use anything other than an OS's native filesystem (many of these habits were migrated from Linux, including my mania for less-than-Admin user accounts). It meant my partitioning scheme had to be a little funky but I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

I think I used FAT32 under Win2k once, when I first got hold of it. I installed it on the same partition as my existing Win98 installation (bad move) after removing my NT4 partition and resizing the Win98 one. After spending lots of time trying to figure out why I could suddenly access other users files (and subsequently trying to figure out where the Permissions options had disappeared to) I came to the realisation that permissions were a native feature of NTFS (with no provision being provided to emulate them on FAT32 partitions).

 

A few weeks later I bought a brand spanking new 20Gb Seagate Barracuda HDD (which failed within 6 months but was quickly replaced and it's replacement is still going strong today since I don't have the money to replace it) and installed Win2k on to its own dedicated 17Gb NTFS partition (with 98 and a seperate partition for the swap file installed on the remaining 2, formatted as FAT32 and FAT16 respectively). I haven't used FAT under an NT OS since and have no intent to do so ever again. FAT is dead as far as I'm concerned and I hope M$ kill it off along with Win9x.

[Julian Mehnle 0]

Admiral LSD, you're taking your words out of my mouth!

[CyberGenX 0]

So in summary boys and girls:

 

1. FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 gigabytes.

2. FAT32 has NO security.

3. FAT32 is not 100% stable.

4. FAT32 is only good for 9.x and dual boot environments.

5. NTFS kicks total @ss!!!

5. If you run FAT32 on NT you need to switch.

[GTwannabe 0]

Yes, NTFS kicks butt. It uses a binary search method that can find basically any file in 7 tries max.

 

There are several tweaks you can do to disable the logging features of NTFS to make it quicker, but it's plenty quick as it is.

[CUViper 0]

Quote:

It uses a binary search method that can find basically any file in 7 tries max.

Huh? I'm not sure I follow your logic here... the only way a binary search could have a MAX of seven attempts would be if there were no more than 128 (=2^7) objects to look through...

[lumpy 0]

Diskeeper and Vopt are slow compared to O&O.

[Alien 1]

Quote:

What do you mean, i.e. what features are you missing?

The interface/GUI doesn't look quite as good, but that's just a minor quibble.

It can't move the swap file to the beginning of the partition.

It's significantly slower - & when I say slower I mean running the XP version on my drive @ UDMA/100 with an Athlon XP 1900+ & 384MB of RAM appears to be noticeably slower than the same drive @ UDMA/66 under 98SE with a K6-2/500 & 192MB of RAM!!!

Not only is it slower, but it's taking longer to do less - it doesn't move the actual folders around. With the 9x version, as well as moving the swap file to the beginning of the partition, you could arrange the rest of the files so that it would be optimised files 1st, then all the folders [i'm assuming this means that the blocks/sectors/clusters/whetever (I forget what they're called) for each folder have been moved all into 1 contiguos lump, so they don't get in the way of files & cause fragmentation themselves] which are the yellow blobs in SD's default colour scheme, then it put's the frequently modified files, & it put's the infrequently modifed files @ the end of the partiton. The XP v. will move these files into order like this, but will not sort or move the folders, which have a nasty habit of getting in the way & hence causing fragmentation.

The thing with folders is true with Diskeeper as well, & due to the way it shows files/folders it is more visibly discernible. Some people would argue that it isn't possible for defraggers to move folders like SD under 9x used to, but that is complete & utter BS. I found that it can be done manually, but that's just me with some experimenting in Explorer & using another defrag prog [possibly O&O - it's been a while since I did this little experiment] to tell me which folders are represented by which yellow blobs. The way I see it is if I can [with a lot of fiddling about] organise folders into a more-or-less contiguos lump manually, then surely 1 of these companies ought to be able to make their defragging prog do it automatically like SD used to do under 98?

[Uykucu 0]

Well jwl812,

 

what you are describing is definetly not caused by NTFS. If you have any kind of respectable hardware you would not be able to notice the difference without some kind of makeshift test that some benchmark utility managed to conjure up, with no real possibility of occurring under normal operation of a computer. Even on 3D games

 

I suggest you look somewhere else. amount of files etc is usually a good reason and manages to degrade even the fastest UW SCSI drives.

 

For one simple example. If you have a 100GB Drive; standart cache settings for IE will take %10 of it as cache. Can you calculate the amount of 1Kb cookies or 5 Kb Jpegs or html to fill that up???

 

Try deleting some of your games, (you can't possibly be playing them all) clean out your Temp folders and use any defrag. How good they are does not affect the performance of your machine as an end result. Windows Defragger will do just fine for the moment. It doesn't screw anything up which is the important bit.

 

About Fat32, well i don't even remember number of times i had to rebuild partitions or to do a low level format because of that piece of crap. stick yo NTFS. Anyway you need to format to go back to Fat32.

[ghayes 0]

"It's not the best defragger in the world but since you only have like 2 other alternatives when it comes to NTFS defragmentation tools it not too bad."

 

There are actually 7 commercial products capable of defragmenting NTFS partitions:

 

PerfectDisk - www.raxco.com

Diskeeper - www.execsoft.com

O&O Defrag - www.oo-defrag.com

FixIt Suite from Ontrack - www.ontrack.com

SpeedDisk (part of Norton Utilities or SystemWorks) - www.symantec.com

VoptXP - www.vopt.com

Defrag Commander - www.winternals.com

 

- Greg/Raxco Software

 

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk and a competitor to the defrag products listed above, as a systems engineer in the support department.

[ghayes 0]

"The interface/GUI doesn't look quite as good, but that's just a minor quibble.

 

It can't move the swap file to the beginning of the partition."

 

What is the significance of placing the swap file at the beginning of the partition? As a hard drive is comprised of several platters and defragmenting occurs at the logical cluster level, where is the beginning of the partition? On which platter?

 

"Some people would argue that it isn't possible for defraggers to move folders like SD under 9x used to, but that is complete & utter BS."

 

On NTFS partitions, folders can be defragmented online. It is technically possible for any defragmenter that uses Microsoft's defrag APIs to defragment folders and consolidate them. Whether they choose to do so or not is a different issue. On FATx partitions, directories can only be done at boot time.

 

- Greg/Raxco Software

 

Disclaimer: I work for Raxco Software, the maker of PerfectDisk - a commercial defrag utility, as a systems engineer in the support department.

[Alien 1]

Quote:

What is the significance of placing the swap file at the beginning of the partition? As a hard drive is comprised of several platters and defragmenting occurs at the logical cluster level, where is the beginning of the partition? On which platter?

If it's @ the beginnning of the partition [howver that's defined] & a fixed size, then it doesn't get in the way of other files.

Quote:

On NTFS partitions, folders can be defragmented online. It is technically possible for any defragmenter that uses Microsoft's defrag APIs to defragment folders and consolidate them. Whether they choose to do so or not is a different issue. On FATx partitions, directories can only be done at boot time.

Well I use FAT32, & as I already stated I've proven that folders can be sorted whilst windows is running. Ok, so my method does involve a little cheating & wouldn't work on ALL folders, such as system ones like Windows, but for others it works just fine. There are a couple of drawbacks to my method, but then I'm not a programmer, so I'm sure someone else could figure it out. I've fogotten the exact details of how I did it as it was a while ago & I have no incentive to repeat the experiment. One of the possible drawback to it [aside from not being able to use it on system/protected folders] was that it would leave the folder with a different time & date of creation, though I know that can be tweaked as well.