Re: to FAT or not to FAT?

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From: Gary G. Little (gglittle.nospam_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 08/25/04 

Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 17:11:32 GMT

If you have to boot to DOS then FAT is required, but a primary argument of
FAT over NTFS has been ignored. Cluster size.

A cluster is the MINIMUM amount of data that will be transferred to and
from the disc, and is defined by the OS for the volume in a FAT system. NTFS
will allow you to specify cluster size. This is critical because it is the
MINIMUM transfer size for normal disc access. Given a 2 Gig partition for
DOS you will have a 64K cluster size that will be transferred to and from
the disc for either reads or writes. Given a file containing 36 bytes, it
will be stored on the disc in a 64k cluster. So to the argument that DOS/FAT
is faster --- that depends on how big your cluster size is. I have seen NTFS
systems far outperform DOS systems when 1/2 gig and larger partitions were
used. 

-- 
The personal opinion of
Gary G. Little
"Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]"
<lanwench@heybuddy.donotsendme.unsolicitedmail.atyahoo.com> wrote in message
news:uE%23vtYriEHA.704@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> John Doue wrote:
> > me wrote:
> >
> >> if you're gonna run dos games through windows, fat is not necessary
> >> pick whatever filesystem you want, just be mindful of the partition
> >> limits fat - 2gb
> >> fat32 -64gb
> >>
> >>
> >> "Shelley" <anonymous@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> >> news:c8a401c489fe$21992680$a601280a@phx.gbl...
> >>
> >>> When installing Win2000 on an existing machine, is it
> >>> correct to choose FAT, FAT32, or the updated file system?
> >>> The only reason I can think of to want DOS on the system
> >>> is to run some old DOS games. If I upgrade my file system,
> >>> what do I lose?
> >>
> >>
> >>
> > Choosing NTFS means you would lose the ability to use most disk
> > utilies in case of problems.
>
> ...well, FAT tends to have a lot more problems....and NTFSDOS will let you
> boot from a floppy & see your data just fine.
>
> > For the average user, including me, Fat
> > 32 is the way to go. The additional benefits of NTFS are mostly
> > valuable for IT professionals. NTFS is supposed to be safer, but it
> > is more complicated to manage, slower (because of the additional
> > complexity of file handling) and recovering from a crash involving
> > file problems in NTFS is much much more difficult.
>
> I don't know about that - I use NTFS even on people's home PCs, and
haven't
> had problems with it. It's fairly 'self healing' and isn't prone to
> fragmentation as badly as FAT is. But to each their own.
> >
> > With regards to partition size limitations, anyway, I do not advise
> > very large partitions since the bigger they are, the more data you
> > have to recover after a crash (file crashes seldom involve more than
> > one partition). But computing is about individual choices...
>
> I always set up at least two partitions - one for system files/programs,
and
> one for data. If there's an OS problem, I can just reinstall over the
system
> partition and not lose data.
> >
> > Regards
>
>

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