NTFS... Any drawbacks?

[SupaCoopa]

I am toying with the idea of installing Windows XP on my computer. I know this will be the start of millions of problems but I don't have a life and this could be interesting
Anyway, one of the reasons I fancy XP is that they can use the NTFS file format. Is anyone aware of any drawbacks of this format, ie incompability with current applications/games/capturing devices/whatever?

[monsoon01]

u want problems, cause if u install XP thats what u'll get, if you want to use the NTFS file sysem go get Windows 2000, it is the best, XP is horrible and will give you nothing but problems, but hey, if thats what you want, go with XP.

[Jeomite]

I had no problems with Windows XP yet. Not one yet. I been using it for atleast a month now. NTFS is good because there is no 4GB limit. But if you dont' defragment your HD often (say once a week; it only takes up to one hour depending on your HD) it will perform poorer than as if it had the FAT32 system. Otherwise it's good. =)

[themamboman]

What problems were you having? I've found XP to be solid. At least as solid as Win2000.

What I did was reformat my hd, install win2000 and then upgrade to xp. The only reason I did this was a glitch in the dos install of xp. Besides that, nothing else went wrong.

I have 256megs of RAM and I think I need more, but it works great. No major problems. Much nicer than WinME.

[pocholin]

Go for it, XP rocks, I had it on my computer at home and it was even more stable than Windows 2000, I used it for just over 2 months, right now I'm back to Windows 2000 because the wireless device I use to share the internet with my daughter doesn't work under XP (there are no drivers yet), and this is vital to her (AOL Chating).

I really really really miss XP multimedia capabilities and ease of use. Loaded faster than Windows 2000 and look nicer too, w2k is getting old and outdated, for example I could plug my Sony laptop thru the firewire and use it as network under XP, Windows 2000 doesn't have drivers for it, so now I can't plug my laptop and exchange files thru the firewire (which is really nice when you have 2-3gb files to transfer among them).

Windows 2000 is a good choice but why settle for less if you don't have to.

Alfonso
Say yes to XP and Bill's monopoly. (I mean...why fight it)

[DiViNeLeFT]

i scanned through everyone elses posts and didnt think i seen this posted... major draw back to ntfs is that DOS and win98/ME dont see it... meaning that if you are duel booting, when your in 98/ME that you wont be able to see your ntfs drive/partition. this also means that you can not format the drive/partition from DOS.

[TOMMO]

I have a dual boot system - WIN2K as NTFS and 98SE as FAT32.

The only problem I have found is that when booting up, no matter which I boot into complains that there is an error on the disk. I just cancel scan disk.

Yes, it is true that you would not be able to format from DOS the NTFS sector. However, with Partition Magic you can format the WIN2K bit. However I have not tried that yet, I just hope its my WIN2K bit that craps out not my 98SE bit with Partition Magic Installed.

Yes it is true that I cannot see into WIN2K from 98, but I can the other way round, so that is ok. I fact I have run programs from WIN2k that are installed on 98, TEMPEnc is one of them.

All in all, I think it is worth the time and trouble, although I cannot comment on XP.

[d4n13l]

With NTFS you can choose what cluster sizes to use, a good option to have when creating file systems as you can make them more efficient for the tasks you want to do on your computer. All the reviews Ive read of XP say its only slightly better than 2000 but Ive never used it so I cant tell you my personnal opinion.

[Martok]

There's a driver for Win9x to access NTFS - NTFS for Win9x.

[DiViNeLeFT]

one thing i just remembered reading about... people say that gaming on a ntfs formatted partition sucks. they said their benchmarks suffered big time. i cant say this from personal experience, only what ive heard.

[TIbrO]

1. Yes you can format NTFS partitions from DOS any day.
2. The reason NTFS Gaming is bad at a LAN party, is because it has to communicate with inferior FAT32. If all of your computers have the same filesystem, then they will work optimally. This is the only instance I have ever heard of games slowing down in XP or 2K. Other than that, games actually run faster on a Win2K/XP machine than in 9x/ME. Must be the RAM handling... Oh, and yeah, XP boots up hella fast! That's my favotire part.

[daren b]

everyone seems to talking about using xp to access a ntfs file system but it is possible to access a second harddrive thats formatted to a ntfs file system using win 98/98se or even 95?
all you need is a file system driver to do this
a good link that explains this is http://www.slaughterhouse.com/pick_102599.html

[DiViNeLeFT]

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On 2001-10-01 15:13:30, TIbrO wrote:
1. Yes you can format NTFS partitions from DOS any day.
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you CANNOT format an ntfs partition from DOS... you can delete an ntfs partition using fdisk... but try booting into DOS and use "format X:"... you will end up formatting the next drive down or get an error if you only have one drive.

are you talking about a different method? because any time i have booted into DOS the only thing that will recognize ntfs is fdisk... and still, that just sees the partition, it doesnt recognize the format.

[d4n13l]

3rd party DOS utils.

[TIbrO]

My bad. That's what I meant. I count using FDISK to delete the NTFS partition and making it into a Primary DOS partition and formatting that to FAT32 as reformatting. I also still count that as DOS being able to "access" NTFS, because it can manipulate it. Seems I use the term reformat too loosely. But yeah, I've actually had to do that before. Delete the NTFS partition, format it to FAT32, start Win2K setup, and that also has a built-in FDISK type mini application during setup for you to choose your destination drive for installation, and you can format to NTFS from there. You can also delete and create partitions through that. But it won't work if you started estup from teh GUI. It tells you that "Setup has necessary files on the partition you are trying to delete" if you try and use that before FDISK.