Re: FAT32 v.s NTFS

From: Gary G. Little (gary.g.little.nospam_at_seagate.com)
Date: 06/14/04 

Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:24:40 GMT

With more and more systems being sold without floppies, making boot floppies
is rapidly becoming archaic, and a "if God intended for us to walk on the
moon ...". FAT, 16 or 32, is severely limited in growth; note that 2000 and
above will not allow you to create a single 80 gig partition on an 80 gig
HDD.

Also realize that file sizes are extremely bloated in any FAT system. Above
1 gig your minimum cluster size is well over 32K. A cluster is the MINIMUM
amount of data that the file system will transfer to and from the disc,
regardless of how big the file is. Multi gig HDDs rapidly give you cluster
sizes of 1 meg. That's fine if you are dealing with a database of audio or
video, but if you're dealing with smaller bits of data such as a customer
database, you can easily end up with data-throughput times well into the
milliseconds because your waiting on a 40 byte record that is contained in a
2 meg cluster.

NTFS provides cluster sizes closer to what the HDD is actually using ...
typically 512 bytes. I've seen from 30% to a 50% increase in free space
simply by formatting for NTFS. Throughput increased even more remarkably. 

-- 
Gary G. Little
Seagate Technologies, LLC
"Leonard" <t.d.c@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:1b45e01c44fc1$767f6780$a101280a@phx.gbl...
> It has been my philosophy to set up systems in FAT32
> rather than NTFS.  Main reasons:
> 1: Losing the boot files under NTFS is goodbye data while
> under FAT you can boot to a floppy.
> 2: When encountering an 'undeletable' virus corrupted file
> under NTFS one is basically out of luck.  Under FAT32 I
> have yet to find a file I cannot delete after booting to a
> floppy.
>
> An experienced friend tells me that, aside from the
> scurity features, Windows 2000 or XP may not work properly
> when set up in FAT32.  So far I have never found a problem
> and have 'been around' for 'a few' years (since the
> 8088's).
>
> I will appreciate any and all feedback on this difference
> of opinion.
>
> Thanks,
> Leonard
>

Relevant Pages

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