formatting USB external drive to NTFS

[Larry]

I ordered a WD 80GB USB2 hard drive that I plan to store disk images on with
Acronis True Image 7.0 in case disaster strikes.

The drive comes formatted FAT32. The hard drive on my computer (Dell 8300
WinXP Home) is formatted NTFSand so far the HD has about 14.5 GB in one
partition + a tiny 39MB hidden partition that Dell uses.

I believe I should re-format the USB drive to NTFS so that I can save an
image without segmenting into multipe 4GB files. Is it worth doing??

If I do I have read two ways to do it.
1. From the DOS prompt type
CONVERT x: /FS:NTFS where s is the drive letter for the new USB2 drive.

2. From the disk management utility in XP delete the current partition and
create a new partition using NTF format.

Any suggestions on which is the better way to go? I read somewhere that if
you are not careful NTFS will create 512B size byte clusters instead of 4K
size byte cluster because the partition is not aligned on 4k blocks. ????

Thanks for any help offered in advance!

Larry

 

[Keshav Barker [MSFT]]

Yes, this is a good idea if you are storing a large number of files on the
disk. If you are only going to store a few large files, you may be better
off with FAT32.

Large block sizes can also help read/write performance if you are storing a
few large files. Go with the smaller block size, otherwise.

One nice advantage for NTFS is defragmentation seems to go a lot faster.

--
-Keshav Barker
Microsoft STE
Windows Division

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.