External Hard Drive

[Murkey]

I just purchased an external hard drive that is formatted Fat32. Is there
any advantage formatting to NTFS or am I just as well off with Fat32 ??
TIA for all responses.

 

[philo]

I just purchased an external hard drive that is formatted Fat32. Is there
any advantage formatting to NTFS or am I just as well off with Fat32 ??
TIA for all responses.

Format it a NTFS

there are a lot of problems with Fat32 : poor cluster size, ;ack of fault
tolerance , plus inability to handle files over 4gig just to name a few

 

[Malke]

I just purchased an external hard drive that is formatted Fat32. Is there
any advantage formatting to NTFS or am I just as well off with Fat32 ??
TIA for all responses.

It depends on how you'll use the drive. If you need to transfer data
from older Microsoft operating systems such as Win9x/ME or other
operating systems such as Linux or OS X, you'll want to leave the drive
formatted FAT32. If you are just going to use this drive on
XP/Win2k/Vista, then format it NTFS.


Malke

 

[Xandros]

FAT32 can't handle files larger than 4GB this can be problem if you are
ripping DVD's to the hard drive or if you are creating full system images
that are larger than 4GB. I suggest you convert to NTFS unless as Malke says
you plan to use the drive with Windows 9x/Me systems. By the way Linux will
work with NTFS fine but I'm not certain about Apple Operating systems.