HDD Formatting question FAT32 or NTFS 160Gb on XP home

[Denvers Dawgs]

Do I want to format to FAT32 or NTFS ona 160GB HHD on an XP system?

[reboot]

Primary boot drive or secondary storage drive?
How often do you need to access it with a floppy?
If you're comfortable, and used to using DOS commands from a floppy, use FAT32, otherwise use NTFS with a 4k (max) cluster size.

[Denvers Dawgs]

Secondary storage

never use floppy

what is 4K max cluster szie?

[ViRaL1]

Secondary storage

never use floppy

what is 4K max cluster szie?

When you install the drive in Window$, you'll need to go into Disk Management under Computer Management and create a volume. When you do this, it will allow you to choose a file system (FAT32 or NTFS) and a cluster size. I would personally recommend NTFS over FAT32 unless you're planning on sharing the data with a 9x (95/98/ME) system. If you're planning on storing anything like DVD ISOs or the like on the drive, FAT32 will limit you to 4GB file sizes while the NTFS limit is much higher. Also, you'll lose several GB of storage space because FAT32 has a partition limit of 127GB.

[kenmasters83]

also FAT32 is slow and sluggish and is more prone to errors and data loss than an NTFS system..

the more you know

[Soopafresh]

Just as important, you have a 4GB file size limitation in Fat32- Not good if you ever plan on doing HDTV transport stream captures, or anything with massive amounts of video data.

[pfh]

I agree with what others said. Advantages of NTFS far out-weigh fat32 properties.

Could always save a small partition as fat32 and the rest NTFS.

[studtrooper]

I'm pretty sure FAT32 doesn't have a use nowadays... There is no reason not to go NTFS!

[SLK001]

Anyway, with only 26 available drives to assign a drive letter to, that leaves a lot of your 160GB hard drive UNUSED!

Go with NTFS... you'll never look back.

[reboot]

SLK001, not true. You can have up to 256 drives.
The first 24 (not 26) as A and B are reserved for floppy's, take the standard letter designation, but you can map other drives (as if they are network drives) with any name you want.

[Skith]

Regarding the cluster sized used on NTFS partitions, smaller clusters are more efficient (less wasted space) but at the cost of performance, especially with larger files.

Using a larger cluster size can increase performance, but at the cost of lost capacity. Think of it this way, a cluster is the smallest unit of storage on a partition. Take for example a partition with 4K clusters. A file that is 101K in size would occupy 26 clusters. In the 26th cluster, only 1 of 4K would be used. The remaining 3K in that cluster can not be used for another file, and is wasted space. Now take the same 101K file and put it into 32K clusters. The file would require four clusters, the 4th of which would have 27K of wasted space.

Smaller clusters also means the drive must perform more reads/writes when working with larger files. File fragmentation also comes into play.

I prefer a balance, with 8 or 16K clusters, depending on the size of the partition and what will be stored on it (boot/text docs/scratch disk/video/etc).

[macrovision]

The above comments about fat32 are true...NFTS stands for New File Transfer System... It's mainly used for systems using large capacity Hard drives and Newer operating systems... You might even say that file indexing(Finders files) are more faster... My iHp-120 mp3 unit (20gb) uses fat32....I formatted it to NTFS and It wouldn't read the files... I believe that's because of the firmware... I added about my mp3 because of the comment that fat32 isn't used? Maybe in newer computers it's not used but other devices it is still used and I use NTFS in my computer and don't have problems transfering to my mp3... Always format using NTFS when running newer operating systems unless your a windows 3.1 fan I got a different answer to the meaning of NFTS and edited this post because I misplaced letters... The meaning varys in what books you read like everything else!

[handyguy]

I turn off content file indexing, it makes thing so slow. Even MS says that it doesn't find files you ask it to. Best file finder is google desktop program, its very small, no slow down & finds files in just a couple of seconds & finds them by words in files too.

[JSB]

I turn off content file indexing, it makes thing so slow. Even MS says that it doesn't find files you ask it to. Best file finder is google desktop program, its very small, no slow down & finds files in just a couple of seconds & finds them by words in files too.

Once you get to a magic number of files, file indexing hoggs you PC really bad.

JSB

[handyguy]

Is there a way to delete that file context indexing makes?

[smearbrick1]

You can just turn off the file indexing service. Check in the control panel under sytem settings => services.

You can also turn off indexing on individual drives just by right clicking on the drive and selecting properties.

[p_l]

NTFS stands for New File Transfer System...

Wouldn't that be NFTS, then? :P




NTFS = New Technology File System