Re: Public Thank You To Microsoft

Tech-Archive recommends: Speed Up your PC by fixing your registry

Karl E. Peterson wrote:
Jim Mack wrote:

I never tried formatting a thumb drive as NTFS -- most of them come
preformatted FAT32 -- and that's the scenario that causes the most
pain, because those things are so slow. It can take hours to
resync an 8GB thumb, and it happens twice a year. Sounds like an
experiment that needs doing...

Lemme know how it goes. :-)

Experiment complete.

I had three identical FAT32 4GB thumb drives. all backing up the same
single branch of a development drive using RoboCopy /MIR. The last
backups had occurred before the DST switch. FYI, I'm nominally at
GMT -05:00, -4 when DST.

I ran the RoboCopy script against an unmodified thumb, and it took 2.5
hours, copying every single file over again. This is the behavior
we've been bemoaning.

For the second drive, I ran CONVERT to make it an NTFS volume, and
applied the same /MIR. Result: 2.5 hours.

Then I set my TZ to make my effective offset -05:00 again (CDT). I ran
CONVERT against the last thumb, then switched the TZ back to EDT. So
now I effectively have what I would have, if I'd done the CONVERT
before the DST switch.

Ran the same script -- fifteen seconds. So clearly FAT32 doesn't use
UTC, and between drives that use NTFS, the time change is not an
issue. RoboCopy is doing the best it can with the data it has.

As long as you don't plan to use your USB sticks in an environment
that doesn't support whatever version of NTFS is on your main box,
reformatting to NTFS seems to be a win. I know I'm sold.

--
Jim Mack
Twisted tees at http://www.cafepress.com/2050inc
"We sew confusion"

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: convert external drive?
    ... >> and D: (NTFS) drives. ... Right now, everything is FAT32, and the external drive is ... So unless you have some special need for a FAT32 partition on your ... All, or virtually all, commercially-available USB external hard drives ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: pagefile
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    (microsoft.public.windows.file_system)
  • Re: convert external drive?
    ... > and D: (NTFS) drives. ... Right now, everything is FAT32, and the external drive is ... So unless you have some special need for a FAT32 partition on your ... All, or virtually all, commercially-available USB external hard drives ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: partition&page file
    ... large USB hard drives being commonly available. ... NTFS can be more secure and it has some additional ... need to get data off of the drive, or do some manual repairs to files, FAT32 ... the partition from another operating system, like 98, or LINUX. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: NTFS hard drives problem
    ... Only slightly relevant to your post but, seeing as you are wildly swapping hardware aournd all over the place and you mentioned converting from Fat32 to NTFS - before converting,, you should of course shunt everything up away from the front end of the hard disk being converted to attain an optimal cluster size. ... tried to install XP from scratch. ... Do NTFS-formatted drives simply refuse ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)