NTFS or FAT32?

[Dave]

I'm looking for some advice. I just purchased a 300gb external USB hard
drive. It'll be used for backups and file storage. I noticed that it came
formatted as FAT32. Is there any reason not to reformat it as NTFS? Are
there any disadvantages to having a NTFS drive for this purpose. Thanks

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Dave

If it is only ever going to be used on NT based systems, then format it..
if, however, the drive might be connected to a system that is not running
NT, W2K, XP, or Server 2003, you may want to leave it as it is..

 

[Squire]

It's your choice,
Fat32 is limited to disksize usable somewhere around 132 gb.
NTFS has no limit

 

[GreenieLeBrun]

I'm looking for some advice. I just purchased a 300gb external USB hard
drive. It'll be used for backups and file storage. I noticed that it came
formatted as FAT32. Is there any reason not to reformat it as NTFS? Are
there any disadvantages to having a NTFS drive for this purpose. Thanks

FAT 32 will have 32Kb clusters, NTFS 4Kb Clusters so less slack space.

DOS (including Win98) will not be able to see the drive, Macintosh
machines (OSX will see the drive but it will be read only, OS9 and less
will not see the drive (if I remember correctly)).

So if you have no intention of using the drive on machines that do not
run XP then NTFS is more efficient.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Dave.

You might find some interesting reading here - and in the pages surrounding
this in the online version of the Windows XP Pro Resource Kit:
When to Use FAT
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_pcxb.asp

The general idea is that Microsoft would like us all to forget FAT as soon
as possible. Unless you plan to install Win9x/ME or MS-DOS on this
computer, go NTFS all the way.

(Old habits die hard. In spite of my stated philosophy, each of my HDs has
a small primary partition up front formatted FAT16 - for maximum
compatibility in case of an emergency that might require me to boot into
MS-DOS. The rest of each HD is an extended partition, divided into multiple
logical drives, all formatted NTFS.)

RC

 

[All Things Mopar]

Today Dave commented courteously on the subject at hand

I'm looking for some advice. I just purchased a 300gb
external USB hard drive. It'll be used for backups and
file storage. I noticed that it came formatted as FAT32.
Is there any reason not to reformat it as NTFS? Are
there any disadvantages to having a NTFS drive for this
purpose. Thanks

I formatted my Maxtor 300 gig as NTFS as well as two extended
partitions on my HD. But, the time to just get a folder tree in
Win XP Pro SP2 sometimes went into the minutes! Never figured
out what I had set wrong, so I just nuked all the stuff that
Windows didn't need and reformatted as FAT32. Performance now
100%.

There is a 198 gig limit on FAT32, though, so I had to partition
my external, which is no biggie.

 

[Jonny]

Only Windows 2000 SP4, XP, and 2003 server recognize the 3rd version of NTFS
that XP implements.

As an added note, if XP can access any original or 2nd version NTFS, it will
automatically be converted to the current version of NTFS. Guess you can
see where this goes for any OS that was using that filesystem...

 

[Dave]

All of my systems are Windows XP so that shouldn't be a problem. It just
sounded like there were advantages to being NTFS. Thanks

 

[Dave]

I never thought about the size limit. I't's shows FAT32 format but I see
all 299,993,137,152 bytes.

Dave

 

[Dave]

It must be 4GB because I noticed that Norton Ghost creates a series of 4GB
files where it was one large file on a NTFS hard drive.

 

[Al Dykes]

It's your choice,
Fat32 is limited to disksize usable somewhere around 132 gb.
NTFS has no limit

FAT32 has a max file size of either 2 or 4GB (I forget) .

 

[Rock]

FAT32 has a max file size of either 2 or 4GB (I forget) .

It's 4GB.

 

[Alan]

4 Gb is the maximum file size in FAT32
The maximum volume size for FAT32 is 2 terabytes. More:-

FAT16 - 16bit cluster addressing, therefore 65,536 clusters are addressable.
Max cluster size of 32KB in DOS-based MS operating systems yields a max
partition size of 2GB. With NT etc., max cluster size is 64KB, therefore max
partition size is 4GB, but FAT16 partitions with 64KB cluster sizes will not
be readable in DOS, 95, 98, or ME.

FAT32 - 32bit cluster addressing, but only 28bits are used (I don't know
why). Theoretical maximum of 268,435,456 clusters, but MS limitations reduce
this to 4,177,920. Theoretical maximum 8TB partition size, practical maximum
2TB partition size, MS maximum ~127.5GB partition size (all based on 32KB
clusters). XP will create FAT32 partitions up to only 32GB, for some
arbitrary reason. XP can read FAT32 partitions up to 2TB.

NTFS - Theoretical maximum 512 yottabytes partition size (2^64 clusters *
64KB cluster size), MS practical maximum 256 terabytes partition size.



Read more exciting stuff :


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32


http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_tdrn.asp

It must be 4GB because I noticed that Norton Ghost creates a series of 4GB
files where it was one large file on a NTFS hard drive.

 

[coal_brona]

Greetings,

Actually, special tool can be used to access NTFS in DOS or Windows
98/me. I suppose using NTFS Reader utility. It is really useful and
helped me before. The tool is included into a mighty set of data
utilities Active@ Boot Disk CD. This is a really awesome set of tool,
you should definately pay attention to it.

http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm