Hard drive speed

[jim s]

I recently had to reinstall Win2K and Roxio Creator 7.5 and other DVD apps.
My 2 internal hard drives are NTFS and the externals are Fat32. There was a
time when the using the internal drives resulted in faster reads and writes
of DVD's. It suddenly seems that using the Fat32 is faster. Any idea why?
Thanks.

 

[jim s]

I have noticed that "write cache' is turned on in Device Manager just for
the internal hard drives. Is this the problem? If yes, can it just be turned
off in Device Manager? Thanks

 

[jim s]

Nope, tried changing that and nothing got better.

 

[Tim]

FAT32 is reportedly a tad faster than NTFS - but it adds risks.

However, if you can use NTFS you should *always* use it as it is a
considerably more reliable file system.

FAT is prone to corruption - remember .chk files? These are lost files and
fragments of files after system crashes.

So, if you don't mind loss of data and possibly loss of system if your sytem
fails, use FAT, otherwise always use NTFS.

The exception to using NTFS is if you have multiple operating systems on
your PC and the other operating systems do not support NTFS. In this case
you should have 1 partition to share data between OS that is FAT and use
NTFS everwhere else where you can.

If your external drives are HDD's then I would convert them to NTFS as well
(so long as you don't ahve a requirement to read them in say Win95).

- Tim