NTFS or FAT32?

[Robc1880]

I am not really sure about the differences between the NTFS and the FAT32 file system. Is one faster than the other? Is there certain benefits of one over the other? Would someone be able to give me a breif description of the differences and maybe suggest which one to go with?

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[khha4113]

NTFS's advantages
<b>Security</b>, you can set file-level permission to control access as well as <b>encryption</b> to protect your sensitive files.
<b>Compression</b>, NTFS compression can be applied to a volume, folder or file therefore saving disk space (Drive Space in W9x can only compress the whole volume, and if a single corrupted sector could cause the loss of the entire volume).
<b>Reliability</b>, NTFS is easy to recover from system failure than FAT32.
<b>Capacity</b>, NTFS can be used on a huge volume (up to 2 TB or more than 2000GB, I think).
I heard that in some cases, FAT volumes can be faster than NTFS' because of the overhead involved in managing NTFS (ie. small drives with a large number of small files), but you wouldn't see any significant difference between these 2.


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[Toejam31]

A good article on the subject:

<A HREF="http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/ntfs-pf.htm" target="_new">Windows XP File System: NTFS</A>

Toey

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[Robc1880]

thanks for the input guys, I think I will reformat and change my file system to NTFS instead of using FAT32. It looks like it has quite a few advantages over FAT32.

Thanks again.

Remember, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.

 

[etp777]

Just so you know, while I tend to think a format and resintall is a good thing overall, there's no need to format just to convert from FAT to NTFS> Simply open up a command promtp (start - run - cmd) then type convert x: /FS:NTFS where x: equals the drive letter of the drive you want to convert.

 

[Robc1880]

I was planning on reformatting because I have a lot of junk on the hard drive and it's gotten pretty slow lately, even though I keep up the maintenance on it. Thanks for that suggestion though.

Remember, there are no stupid questions, just stupid people.