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Thread ID: 30130	2003-02-11 08:16:00	FAT or NTFS	wotz (335)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
120253	2003-02-11 08:16:00	It looks like I am up for a reformat (slow & crashing). Last time I installed XP I stuck with FAT32 due to familiarity with stuff like boot disks, partition magic, ghost and suchlike. Sadly I don't have a ghost imageof my XP install, only the win98 (I have XP upgrade). Should I change to NTFS now? The security aspects are not an issue. Are there enough other benefits to changing?	wotz (335)
120254	2003-02-11 08:41:00	NTFS also handles total crashes better than fat32. I am assuming that you have an older version of ghost which may not work with NTFS but Partition Magic should handle it ok	mikebartnz (21)
120255	2003-02-11 09:50:00	Yep, my ghost is old. Might have to update it. What happens with NTFS if you get a file install itself and can't be deleted from windows? i had it happen recently, and booted to dos to get rid of it?	wotz (335)
120256	2003-02-11 09:57:00	I would assume XP has the Recovery Console like 2000 so if you install that you can use it. It gives you the option when booting when it is installed. Do a search for it in the Help.	mikebartnz (21)
120257	2003-02-11 10:35:00	If security is not an issue, FAT32 uses less disk space (NTFS reserves a huge chunk for its file tables) and you have the advantage of DOS operability plus the familiarity of your existing utilities. Personally I don't believe NTFS offers any worthwhile advantage to the average user. Cheers Billy 8-{) :)	Billy T (70)
120258	2003-02-11 14:58:00	Well for starters, NTFS offers NO security advantages to the average workstation, just bung in a knoppix CD or download a NT password change boot disk to demonstrate this. As for compatibility, using Fat32 will make it easier for you when you change to Linux ;) as Fat32 is an open standard and can be easily read/written to by Linux, where as M$ hasn't released the specifications for NTFS, so it can only be read from, (you can write to it, but its highly experimental, (based on reverse engineering)). Oh and from my personal experience, I have had way more problems with NTFS based drives than with Fat32 ones. Hope this is somewhat useful. Cheers Liam (on the Linux box :D)	nz_liam (845)
120259	2003-02-11 19:28:00	NTFS while being more stable is also slower. In desktop systems anyway. So in your case your better off staying with FAT32.	roofus (483)
120260	2003-02-11 22:23:00	I use NTFS.... no idea why I do though. It is nice having the ability to encrypt stuff and what not if you want to..	-=JM=- (16)
120261	2003-02-11 22:26:00	I use it so I can prevent the rest of the family (They have a seperate login) from being able to fill up the HDD with junk. It gets to a certain stage then rejects them, and they have to remove a game or two that they quite honestly never play. Its great for blocking them out of folders too! For the average user wanting to do that, then its great, but there are ways around it. Never tried encryption of folders...	Chilling_Silence (9)
120262	2003-02-12 00:48:00	NTFS has one large advantage for users with large unpartitioned hard disks . I use ntfs on my windows drive (80Gb) as it has a much smaller cluster size, so those thousands of pesky <1kb files only take up 1kb each instead of 32kb as with fat32 . The difference in file size makes a huge difference over the disk, as I used to have nearly 4 . 5Gb in wasted disk space just by using fat32 on 35Gb of files . If you want to see if you can recover much disk space, highlight all the files and folders on a drive (in windows explorer or my computer) and look at the properties . The file size number is the actual size of the file, and the size on disk is the actual space taken up on the drive storing the file . If there is a large (more than a few Gb) difference between the two numbers you will be better off with ntfs as most of this will be recovered . HTH Craig .	craig_b (2740)
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