what is the difference in fat32 and NTFS HDD formating???

[quasar923]

im wondering the difference in fat32 and NTFS HDD formating. what are the pros and cons in each if there are any if there is any difference. i have always used NTFS.

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

The big con of FAT32, any file over 4gb is not able to be copied and pasted. On NTFS, it is.

 

[panchoman]

also, ntfs is limited to only windows nt and above. linux and mac os x do not fully support it. i know mac os x can read ntfs, but not read it out. ntfs is good for windows systems, but if you plan on linux and mac os x, you're better off with fat32

 

[Silverel]

FAT highs:

* The effective work requires few of RAM.
* Fast work with small and average directories.
* The disc implements less movements of the heads (as compared with NTFS).
* The effective work on slow discs.

FAT lows:

* Quick performance decrease with the fragmentation going up (only for FAT32).
* Difficulty in access to big files (more than 10% of the disc space).
* Very slow work with directories containing huge amount of files.

NTFS highs:

* Fragmentation does not influence the system performance (the work might became worse as far as data access is concerned).
* Complicity of the structure of directories and the number of files do not affect the performance.
* Quick access to the required file fragment (i.e. editing of big .wav files).
* Very quick access to small files (several hundreds bytes) - the whole file is located in the same place as the system data (MFT recording).

NTFS lows:

* The memory size mustn't be less than 64 MBytes.
* Slow discs and controllers without Bus Mastering slows the system performance down tremendously.
* The work with average-size directories is quite difficult, since they are fragmented.
* The disc working for a long time with 80% - 90% of its space occupied shows low performance.

-source

That was one of the few pro/con articles I could find.

Really though, NTFS is the modern approach to HDD's. You should really only use FAT32 if you NEED to.

 

[quickie]

With newer setups, there's really no reason to use FAT32. (unless for some reason you still have Win98 installed or something). With WinXP+ go for NTFS.

 

[von kain]

the main differnce between those two is the main architecture of the file systems and clustering ie. the fat can only allocate 4177918 clusters when in the ntfs is unlimited check this one http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

 

[craigwhiteside]

why doesnt anyone use hpfs , would be a lot better for benchmarks

 

[panchoman]

why doesnt anyone use hpfs , would be a lot better for benchmarks

well maybe if people knew more about it i guess. what is that? is that what apple uses?

 

[von kain]

why doesnt anyone use hpfs , would be a lot better for benchmarks

nope.



panco ..http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_File_System

 

[Necrofire]

why doesnt anyone use hpfs , would be a lot better for benchmarks

Because I didn't know about it. I had to google it.
It seems too old, HPFS was just an 'improved' FAT, while NTFS is completely different.

Really, NTFS, hell, most linux distributions today come with full read and write support for NTFS anyway. Even if your distribution doesn't have NTFS support, here it is.
NTFS ftw

 

[von kain]

exfat and winfs is very promising though...

 

[cdawall]

why doesnt anyone use hpfs , would be a lot better for benchmarks

not really appears to be very similar to NTFS and in fact if you read up on the wiki comparo page NTFS can do some things that HPFS cant making NTFS a slightly better choice though both are supported with XP PRO

source

Windows 95 and its successors Windows 98, Windows ME could only read/write HPFS when mapped via a network share, but could not read it from a local disk. They listed the NTFS partitions of networked computers as "HPFS", because NTFS and HPFS share the same filesystem identification number in the partition table.

Windows NT 3.1 and 3.51 had native read/write support for local disks and could even be installed onto an HPFS partition. This was because Microsoft at the time was creating OS/2 version 3 and implemented the filesystem.

Windows NT 4 still could read and write from local HPFS formatted drives however, using HPFS was discouraged starting with Windows NT 4 and in subsequent versions. Starting with Windows 2000 the filesystem driver pinball.sys enabling the read/write access was removed from the default installation. Pinball.sys was included on the installation media for Windows 2000 and could still be manually installed and used with some limitations.[citation needed] Later Windows versions did not ship with this driver.

Windows XP Professional allows to read and write like Windows 2000 since they are similar in code.

 

[craigwhiteside]

http://www.betanews.com/article/IBM_Builds_Super_Fast_File_System/1141943597
i dont know if this could somehow lead to a windows version of this

 

[Deleted member 3]

FAT lows:
* Difficulty in access to big files (more than 10% of the disc space).

Fat only supports files up to 2GB, so that 10% is rather impossible on modern computers.

NTFS highs:

* Fragmentation does not influence the system performance (the work might became worse as far as data access is concerned).
* Complicity of the structure of directories and the number of files do not affect the performance.
* Quick access to the required file fragment (i.e. editing of big .wav files).
* Very quick access to small files (several hundreds bytes) - the whole file is located in the same place as the system data (MFT recording).

Don't forget filesystem security, ie access rights per user or group, compression, encryption and most importantly it's a journaling filesystem.

NTFS lows:

* The memory size mustn't be less than 64 MBytes.

That memory argument sounds a bit silly, I've been using NTFS ever since NT4 (ie win95 times) on machines with far lower RAM (NT4 requires only 12MB), I think this would apply more to huge drives. Though a system with huge drives most likely has more than 64MB RAM.

Really though, NTFS is the modern approach to HDD's. You should really only use FAT32 if you NEED to.

I think that's the right conclusion, FAT hardly has a reason to exist nowadays. Perhaps the ease of dataexchange between various OSes is an argument, but about all OSes have options to support NTFS even if it isn't native. And you can always use a network to share, no filesystem limits there.

 

[Mussels]

Fat only supports files up to 2GB, so that 10% is rather impossible on modern computers.

fat32 does 4GB files

NTFS does have better security, by far.
NTFS doesnt work on USB drives for some reason.

 

[AsRock]

More lost fragments with Fat32 as well unless using Linux.

 

[Deleted member 3]

fat32 does 4GB files

NTFS does have better security, by far.
NTFS doesnt work on USB drives for some reason.

You're right, my mistake. 2GB is the silly limit on iso9660 or whatever the DVD standard is.

NTFS works on USB drives though, both HD's and flash. You have to uncheck optimize for quick removal though.

 

[Mussels]

You're right, my mistake. 2GB is the silly limit on iso9660 or whatever the DVD standard is.

NTFS works on USB drives though, both HD's and flash. You have to uncheck optimize for quick removal though.

i've got it working on an E-sata drive (160GB) by formatting it on sata, but windows just wont let me format a USB connected drive as anything but fat32. its weird and annoying... you got any specific details on whats different when using it over USB? (E-sata works as hotplug for me 'quick removal' with NTFS)

 

[Deleted member 3]

i've got it working on an E-sata drive (160GB) by formatting it on sata, but windows just wont let me format a USB connected drive as anything but fat32. its weird and annoying... you got any specific details on whats different when using it over USB? (E-sata works as hotplug for me 'quick removal' with NTFS)

The last 9 words of the part you quoted.

 

[Mussels]

The last 9 words of the part you quoted.

i meant, what else? does it have any actual downsides, or is it just MS being weird?

 

[Deleted member 3]

i meant, what else? does it have any actual downsides, or is it just MS being weird?

Write cache.

 

[Mussels]

Write cache.

awesome-some!

good to know.

 

[AddSub]

Pretty accurate listing Silverel.

I personally prefer FAT32. It IS faster than NTFS (there is a small but benchmarkable difference) and also it is much easier to recover from disastrous OS-induced and/or hardware disk crashes simply due to availability of more robust tools and the evident FAT32 approachability.

NTFS's alternate data streams (ADS) is something I find distasteful and an obvious security risk. In fact, if file system security matters to you, or data security in general, you might want to skip Windows operating systems completely and go straight into Unix territory. Seriously, when someone implies NTFS over any other file system (usually FAT32) on the basis of data security I can’t help but laugh.

Primary issue with FAT32 is the file size limit. So if you work with large video files and such I recommend an NTFS partition. (As a supplement of course.)

 

[francis511]

I`m not sure , but isn`t there a 32-gig partition size limit with fat 32 ?

 

[AddSub]

I`m not sure , but isn`t there a 32-gig partition size limit with fat 32 ?

No, FAT32 partitions are limited to about 8 terabytes.

Built-in Windows XP tool will let you format FAT32 but only @ 32GB or less. Another Microsoft tactic to force people to use NTFS. Much like Vista and Directx 10. With third-party tools you can go above 32GB easily.