Fat 32

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
b11_ said:
Under W xp, what are the advantages and disadvantages of Fat 32 partitions?
Click to expand...


The only conceivable "advantage" of using FAT32 would be if you also
needed to access the partition in question from an obsolete OS, such as
Win9x. Otherwise, FAT32 is pretty much a handicap.

Personally, I wouldn't even consider using FAT32 when NTFS is an
option. FAT32 has no security capabilities, no compression
capabilities, no fault tolerance, and a lot of wasted hard drive space
on volumes larger than 8 Gb in size. But your computing needs may
vary, and there is no hard and fast answer.

To answer your questions without getting too technical is
difficult, but has been handled quite well by Alex Nichol in the
article here:

FAT & NTFS File Systems in Windows XP
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfs.htm

Somewhat more technical information is here:

Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=kb;en-us;Q314463

Choosing Between File Systems
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...prodtechnol/winntas/tips/techrep/filesyst.asp

NTFS file system
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH
 
Bruce said:
Personally, I wouldn't even consider using FAT32 when NTFS is an
option. FAT32 has no security capabilities, no compression
capabilities, no fault tolerance, and a lot of wasted hard drive space
on volumes larger than 8 Gb in size. But your computing needs may
vary, and there is no hard and fast answer.
Click to expand...

What if you dont need special security, compression, or fault tolerance?
 
Fat32 is fault tolerant (more so than NTFS), is defragmentation tolerant, is faster on small drives and with large files on large drives.

Perhaps you confuse NTFS transacted file system with Fat32's duplication of data. In theory NTFS shouldn't become corrupted (but it does) but Fat assumes it will become corrupted and can fix 99% of errors. Fat's only point of losing data is in the directory files. Note only 9x dos mode scandisk can properly fix fat drives - never use the windows one as it doesn't use the backuped fat.
 
David Candy said:
Fat32 is fault tolerant (more so than NTFS),
Click to expand...

I disagree strongly with that. NTFS is a journaling file system. If
the power goes off while a disk operation is being executed, you won't
notice a thing when you bring the system back up, NTFS will
automatically access its journal and fix the damage. FAT32 will want
to run CHKDSK, which can take quite a while, depending on the size of
the partition. And you will likely lose something.

is defragmentation tolerant, is faster on small drives and with large files on large drives.
Click to expand...

I'm not at all sure what you mean by "degragmentation tolerant". XP
includes a defragger that works just fine of NTFS drives. FAT32
probably is faster on small drives. I'm not sure about large files on
large drives. In general, NTFS is a *far* better choice for the huge
drives being manufactured today.
 
But most file data is stored twice in Fat. Not so NTFS.

Fat32 looks for 500K free space before writing. This means files don't fragment, at least not very often and then in big fragments.
 
David Candy said:
But most file data is stored twice in Fat. Not so NTFS.
Click to expand...

Most data? The FAT itself is backed up (being somewhat fragile).
Nothing else is duplicated. With the journaling going on, NTFS doesn't
need that redundancy (the journal provides backup).
Fat32 looks for 500K free space before writing.
Click to expand...

What makes you thing that? AFAIK, that's not true at all. What sense
would it make to insist on 500Kb to store a 10Kb file?
 
Back
Top