NTFS or FAT32

petal · Post by **petal** » Thu Oct 16, 2003 5:58 pm

Wow Nestor - thanks for the input and the links.

Ok I can now reveal to you all that I went for NTFS, two partitions one at 30 GB and one at 90 GB.

Still there's issue Astroman mentioned about the second partition (or every logical drive?) that might introduce an additional look up in the filestructure (or something like that) which meant a decrease in performance. Can anyone confirm this?

Cheers!
Thomas

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Thu Oct 16, 2003 7:08 pm

You won't notice a thing... If you were to try both wasy, you tourn your eyes and I ask you: Which one is on now? You woun't be able to tell. There are several truths that, nevertheless, being soo small in their acction, are like lies...

Well, you know what I mean, don't worry.

Nevertheless, which is your setup? Can you tell please...

petal · Post by **petal** » Thu Oct 16, 2003 7:44 pm

I have:

AMD 2000+ XP
Gigabyte GA-7VAXFS Via KT-400 (9 Masterverbs

)
512 MB DDR PC 2100
120 GB Seagate 7200.7 8 MB Cahce
GeForce2 MX 440 32 MB
CW Electra
CW XTC

It doesn't mean that much to me to have two partitions instead of one - I'll pick the configuration that is fastest (I do make backups of my music

) So if having only one partition on one HDD is faster than having two, I'll have to do a little partition magic

Cheers!
Thomas

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Thu Oct 16, 2003 11:08 pm

Well, I see you have a powerful system. This is what I suspected cos it's quite new. Again, don't worry about speed, there will be no difference, well... ok... perhaps a cyle or two, do you think it matters? No it doesn't.

There are far too many other more important things to take care of to optimise your system, and this is not an important one.

Neutron · Post by **Neutron** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 11:38 pm

a second drive may also be a bonus because you can put the windows swap file on it. that way any swapping (although it can be minimised these days with cheap ram etc) will be on another drive and not slow down any disk acess your software may need.

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 12:03 am

Where do I find information on how to setup a swap file? It's perhaps obvious, but I've just read it and would like to implement it in my studio side of things... Cheers Neutron.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 9:53 am

If you don't have a second drive and are worried about the first one crashing and loss of your system etc., you can partition your drive and use a program such as "Drive Image" which will allow you to span the image in sizes small enough to save to CDs. This would be even more safe than having a second drive for your image although take more effort.

virtualstudio · Post by **virtualstudio** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 1:19 pm

according to our friend subhuman in the topic http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... forum=3&85 ,
see his first post ,

I have made a partision with sample files fat32 and the rest NTFS works fine with me.

regards

[ This Message was edited by: virtualstudio on 2003-11-22 13:20 ]

[ This Message was edited by: virtualstudio on 2003-11-22 13:21 ]

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 8:27 pm

It probably doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference one way or the other. I would not use fat16 though.

King of Snake · Post by **King of Snake** » Thu Jan 15, 2004 4:00 pm

Hi guys, having just received a spanking new Maxtor 120GB HD, I have a question. I've already learned here that I should use NTFS, but preferably keep a second disk as well. Now I do have my 2 old HD that could do the job, but they're both slower than the new one which is ATA133, while the other two are ATA66 (I think). If I keep one of the old HD's will the new one run at the slow speed as well? If that's so then I see little benefit in keeping the old disks.

Micha · Post by **Micha** » Fri Jan 16, 2004 2:16 am

long time ago, when PIO was king you had to look for this. ATA 66/100/133 (connected with the 80 cable) uses, like SCSI does, separate channels. So don't worry.

krizrox · Post by **krizrox** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 4:22 pm

I don't know how much of this applies to anyone anymore but I thought I'd offer up a few gotchas after having just spent a considerable amount of time rebuilding a PC.

Switching from Fat32 to NTFS isn't without some potential problems - depending on what software and hardware you're using and how you work.

I decided to switch over to NTFS formatting on my HD partitions after having to rebuild my PC. I had no good reason to do this except for the recommendations made here. I thought maybe I'd find an advantage. Can't say I did. Didn't notice any sort of performance improvement at all.

Besides that, I ran into a problem with two of the most important pieces of software I use on a regular basis.

1) Norton Ghost - If you are using an older version (like I am - V2002 to be exact), it won't work with NTFS partitions. You can not save a Ghost file to an NTFS partition with this particular version of Ghost. It would seem you need to upgrade to whatever is the latest and greatest. Also, if you have some Ghost files that were created with a FAT32 partition to begin with, you can not simply put them back onto an NTFS partition. The partition will revert back to FAT32.

2) PartitionMagic/BootMagic - Oddly, this is now a Norton product. Apparently, PowerQuest sold the rights to Symantec. In any case, if you are a BootMagic user, BootMagic will not work with NTFS partitions. It needs to boot from a FAT32 partition. There is a workaround but it is clumsy.

I'm seriously considering going back to FAT32 for all my partitions. I've never really had a problem (AFAIK) with FAT32. Can't see any performance improvement at all.

So I guess, if you're like me, be careful! It's never easy

[ This Message was edited by: krizrox on 2004-11-22 16:24 ]

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 5:15 pm

Newer versions of Ghost and BootMagic will cope with NTFS just fine.

NTFS really is much more secure and less prone to corruption.

edit: on top of all this you don't get those stupid disk checks anymore when hard-rebooting after a bad crash etc.

[ This Message was edited by: darkr3zin on 2004-11-22 18:30 ]

krizrox · Post by **krizrox** » Tue Nov 23, 2004 7:46 pm

Don't know about Ghost but the latest version of BootMagic (8.0) can not be installed on an NTFS partition.

The workaround is to install it to a FAT16 partition. It's a messy fix.

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Wed Nov 24, 2004 8:06 am

Sorry, I confused Bootmagic with DriveImage. I haven't used Bootmagic for years.

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 9:27 am

NTFS has always been a bit bogus for me. Had the ghost problem, now I have some directories that are impossible to delete, even in admin mode. Chkdsk and Partition Magic and whatnot can't find anything wrong, tried messing with every disk-fixing util I could get my hands on, to no avail. As much as I want to like it and use it, it always does something really tweaky like this. I'd love it if it were anywhere near the *nix filesystems in terms of reliability and whatnot, but it's not. It has all sorts of dodgy small details, like not being able to have a file and a dir of the same name at the same place. I understand how this is practical and similar to *nix in terms of implementation, but Windows' handling of it is pretty dumb.

FAT is dumber, but stuff like this never happens with it. It's very dumb and very docile but easy to fix. Easy to ghost. Easy to access from any OS, dos boot disks, etc. 3 out of 4 of my partitions are FAT now (the fourth is NTFS with the stuck dir

.)

Also I'm not sure how much more efficient NTFS can be, since there's more metadata associated to files, and more system calls necessary for access control and things. I can't say I've noticed any difference as far as speed is concerned tho, I use both a FAT and NTFS partition for audio, and they both pretty much work the same for me.

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 10:53 am

first off, I love how files never got corrupted on NTFS.

Most of the extra calls IMO from XP when using NTFS is Indexing, Date Last Accessed, etc which can be quite easily disabled somehow.

The most annoying is, as you say, files being tagged 'in use' when the application has been disconnected from the file. I suspect the network has to do with this, not sure tho. My only current solution for that is to copy/backup/ghost that partition, delete and restore it. Bit messy I know, but there's only 2-3 files in my system that suffer this problem - they cannot be deleted or moved in another way then deleting/formatting the partition.

If not for backwards compatibility with *nix/Win98 OS'es, nothing would stop me from using an all NTFS drive system.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Tue Nov 30, 2004 12:11 pm

NTFS until we all go 64 bit.

[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2004-11-30 12:11 ]