formating 300gb drive in FAT32 format from win ME dos will it work?

[William.R.Reisen]

Why is FAT32 is a very poor choice
for giant partitions?

I want to put lots of uncompressed video clips on it. I just thought
that FAT32 disks can be read written faster than NTFS. Does it not
work like that when partitions get this big?

I've found it easier before to have one large partition. Will this
degrade performance over having two smaller partition.

I've got a brand new system dual xeon with asus motherboard and the
drive is a 10 RAID 4x160Gb 7200rpm on a 2400A adaptec ATA PCI card. I
had to leave it over night to format!

Thanks for the info.

 

[Al Dykes]

Why is FAT32 is a very poor choice
for giant partitions?

I want to put lots of uncompressed video clips on it. I just thought
that FAT32 disks can be read written faster than NTFS. Does it not
work like that when partitions get this big?

I've found it easier before to have one large partition. Will this
degrade performance over having two smaller partition.

Video ? You may find the 4GB/file limit it FAT32 a problem.

 

[Les Herrman]

Why is FAT32 is a very poor choice
for giant partitions?

For the simple reason that the cluster size for it will be horrendous
on that size of a partition. You will waste a ton of space on it.

I want to put lots of uncompressed video clips on it. I just thought
that FAT32 disks can be read written faster than NTFS. Does it not
work like that when partitions get this big?

No. Actually the NTFS partiton will be much more efficient than the
FAT 32 one.

You will also be limited on the size of a file you can save to the FAT
32 partition. Fat 32 files can not be larger than 4 GB. Since you
are saving uncompressed video clips you could run into this limit.

I've found it easier before to have one large partition. Will this
degrade performance over having two smaller partition.

It will if you format to FAT 32. If you format to NTFS you wont take
as big of a performance hit but will still have a small hit by not
using smaller partitions. Xp prefers the NTFS file system and will use
it more efficiently.

 

[J. Clarke]

Why is FAT32 is a very poor choice
for giant partitions?

I want to put lots of uncompressed video clips on it. I just thought
that FAT32 disks can be read written faster than NTFS. Does it not
work like that when partitions get this big?

Regardless of any performance consideration, FAT32 has a 4 gig file size
limit, which may be OK for "video clips" but not for video editing.

I've found it easier before to have one large partition. Will this
degrade performance over having two smaller partition.

I've got a brand new system dual xeon with asus motherboard and the
drive is a 10 RAID 4x160Gb 7200rpm on a 2400A adaptec ATA PCI card. I
had to leave it over night to format!

In that case you need to ditch the Adaptec and get something decent.
Adaptec is hardly the RAID performance leader in either the ATA or the SCSI
markets.

 

[Eric Gisin]

There will be no difference in the R/W rates for large files. FAT32 will be
faster with small files (like browser cache). FAT32 will be slower to chkdsk
and defrag. A drive filled to 90% will be less fragmented under FAT32. NTFS
will not lose files like FAT does on BSOD and power fails. Use NTFS for the OS,
and another volume for data.