external hard drive- NTFS or FAT32?

[Evander]

I bought my first external hd, a 250GB firewire/usb unit. I plan on using it for an xp desktop via firewire and an older (2001) laptop with win2k via usb. Both those drives are formatted to ntfs. This ext. drive was formatted in fat32 out of the box. Is there any reason not to format it to ntfs? My interest is to break the 4GB file barrier (great for DVD ISOS + vid capture) but if there are other compelling reasons to go NTFS or just leave fat32 I would appreciate hearing them.

[ROF]

No reason you can't switch to NTFS now. Unless you plan to use the drive with older OSs.

[jman98]

Norton Ghost has some issues where it has problems writing to external NTFS drives. If you do a web search, you can find some pages that talk about this. If you're not going to write Ghost images to any external discs, you should definitely use NTFS. It is possible to workaround the limitations in Ghost, but you have to be a reasonably experienced user to make use of any of the fixes.

[vitualis]

NTFS.

Regards.

[lordsmurf]

NTFS

[Evander]

Thanks for the replies. Before posting i did google "usb hard drive ntfs" and variations of that. one of the results took me here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/05/108205.aspx
"> What's the issue? Optimize for Performance to format. Format. Change to Optimize for Quick Removal. Done. (Had to do just this a couple of weeks ago for my external firewire drive.)

I'm afraid that won't work. A filesystem that supports quick removal will flush lazy writes quickly (~1 sec). The FAT driver in XP does this, while the NTFS driver in XP doesn't. So fiddling with the optimize option after the formatting won't help.

NTFS also plays poorly with hibernate. Here's a good way to corrupt your drive:
1. hibernate with your 1394/USB drive attached
2. Take it to another machine and add files
3. Bring it back to the original machine and resume

The FAT driver will remount the drive, tossing out all its cached state on the assumption an offline edit may have occured. NTFS doesn't do this. Thus it'll be using stale cached metadata after the resume, the result being drive corruption.

In summary - NTFS in XP just doesn't play with removable media well."

What do you think of that?
And let's say i decide to format to ntfs- is the best way to right click -> format
in winxp or is there a better way? I noticed xp ONLY would allow me to format the usb drive to ntfs so I hope I can take that as a good sign that USB drives play well with ntfs.

Also, i don't use Ghost but an older version on acronis trueimage so I don't think that problem applies to me

[lordsmurf]

Whoever said "NTFS in XP just doesn't play with removable media well" is a dumbass. NTFS is the file system, who cares if the drive is external, internal IDE or internal SATA. NT-based OS's are optimized with NTFS (NT file system, duh!). I sometimes wonder if blogs, forums and user-based system have more bad advice than good. Blogs tend to be especially worthless.

Anyway, let me share a personal experience:

I bought a pre-formatted USB 2.0 Western Digital 400GB hard drive earlier this year. I plugged it in, and it really did not work well. FAT32 was the problem, not really sure why. Anyway, I prefer NTFS anyhow, so I formatted my USB2 400GB WD drive to NTFS using DOS (cmd).

type CONVERT X: /FS:NTFS ... where "X:" is the drive to be converted.

After I did that, I was totally fine. I've filled the drive up to 1MB free at one point, using it as temp space for some raw AVI files.

FAT32 is a slower way to access files on Windows XP (not sure if that holds true on 2000, doubt it's faster). You'd have to have a good reason to leave it FAT32 instead of using NTFS, on an NT/2K/XP system. I really cannot think of any.


edited for spelling

[throwingks]

I have never personally done any experiments, I just leave in NTFS. But, I have read in many places Fat32 is faster than NTFS. NTFS is more stable and more secure. It holds more file attributes as well. All of those are more important to me than the almost insignifigant speed boost of Fat32.

[genki500]

I have many external drivers (both format), and I have not seen a major difference in speed. However, I did have trouble clone NTFS when booted from a CD (someone always screws up computer in un-thinkable way, it is so much easier doing a clone than re-install.) Leave FAT32 alone, no reason to fool with it, unless, you have the need moving many huge files.

[Jester700]

I use FAT32 on my external drives so I can share files with Macs (a local studio here uses ProTools). But if I didn't need to do that, I'd use NTFS. I never saw a speed diference (and never saw a good test that proved one) but it's more robust.

[oldandinthe way]

I have several external drives. Those that are running NFTS seem to be running faster. Got to get around to converting the others.

[Conquest10]

No reason you can't switch to NTFS now. Unless you plan to use the drive with older OSs.

Or a Mac.

[bevills1]

NTFS uses smaller clusters than FAT32 and is better for Win2k and later, but you should leave it FAT32 if it's ever to be used with WinMe or earlier versions which can't read NTFS drives.

[ROF]

No reason you can't switch to NTFS now. Unless you plan to use the drive with older OSs.

Or a Mac.

People still have them?

[vitualis]

Rule of thumb - never add or remove hardware (internal or peripheral) when hibernated.

Regards.