File systems

[Z!re]

Andrew, that site is pure and utter crap. Any site that demands you register to even read is crap. And i disslike them.
Add to that the 14, FOURTEEN, cookies it sent me, and the 50+ ads it slapped in my face.
Only to have it go: Whine, you have to lower your security setting, otherwise you're not allowed to view our cool forum!

Go to the website and
Scroll down.....to the comments...

Oh ya, there they are.. all the ads and random crap made me NOT scroll down.. I hat that site.. worst design.. ever.

[anarky]

Anarky, you will actually have to use NTFS unless you split your drive into smaller partitions because FAT32 can't support volumes larger than 32Gb.

I beg to differ: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

I've just found NTFS to be faster.

>anarky

[Kylemc]

FAT32 can't support volumes larger than 32Gb.

Yep, this is wrong. I've a 40GB FAT32 partition.

[na_th_an]

I'd say that 30Gb is the limit. If your hard disk is < 30Gb, use FAT32 as it will perform better. If your hard disk is >30Gb, use NTFS 'cause it will perform better. In both cases, with >10Gb HDDs, NTFS will take advantage of better space usage.

BTW, FAT32 is needed by MSDOS if you are gonna boot in MSDOS. To run MSDOS programs from Windows XP it doesn't matter which filesystem you are using, 'cause who actually reads from disk is not the MSDOS directly, but the NTVDM.

[Kevin_theprogrammer]

I've got some reinstalling to do...

[LooseCaboose]

Yep, this is wrong. I've a 40GB FAT32 partition.

Hmm, the site I was reading said that Windows doesn't allow (or maybe just recommends) FAT32 partitions above 32Gb. In any case, you probably shouldn't because the FAT tables become large and slow, NTFS is a much better choice for the larger volumes (unless you require FAT for some reason).

[Z!re]

Windows 2000, FAT32 partition of 80GB, no problems, the file table is actually smaller than that of NTFS, only difference is that NTFS is dynamic. So it starts small, but once you start filling the HD, it uses more than FAT32..
This is from practical experience and comparing NTFS vs FAT32
NTFS is faster than FAT32, that is true.. but only as long as the NTFS filetable is un-fragmented, and the rest of the disk is pretty much unfragmented too.
Especially if you have a variable len clustersize in NTFS you'll get a huge speedhit with fragmented drives.
Whereas FAT32 pretty much stay the same (HD takes longer to read when fragmented, but still not as much slowdown and speed variation as NTFS)

Note that NTFS is faster all the time, it's speed just varies like hell and it's ner impossible to accurately compare the two as they work very differently. Near empty, or filled with small files, HD's work best with NTFS

However, if you have a HD filled with large files, say, your personal media library, where you store 100 DVD movies, each being around 2GB in size (we're talking DVD ISO files here as an example)
Then FAT32 is better, as you can have a large clustersize, meaning fewer clusters to "search" for the filedata and the file-table wont be as large as in NTFS.

As a closing comment.. why is everyone so focused on HD speed? HD's are slow, end of story. For a personal compouter, if it takes 20 seconds, or 10 seconds to transfer 500MB wont matter really.
It's a different thing for a company that passes data between servers, it needs to be done fast.

My HD's are slow as hell, and I can honestly say I've never suffered from it. Sure, it takes a while to copy large amounts of data, but how often do you move 5gb+ anyways?


WindowsXP+FAT32 is very very bad, sudden poweroutages or incorrect shutdown of XP can/will lead to HD fuckup and force you to reinstall everything. There's a MSKB entry about it somewhere, or maybe it was removed, some people who bashed XP for messing up their HD's. It has happened to a few friends of mine.
XP works just fine with NTFS, no matter how you abuse it (well, any os will crap up if you overabuse it, but a poweroutage is something you can demand it to be andle to handle)

[anarky]

...and thus I have switched to NTFS.

>anarky

[LooseCaboose]

the file table is actually smaller than that of NTFS

NTFS stores two copies of the file tables to allow for journaling and recovery, FAT32 only stores a single copy. NTFS also stores a number of attributes that FAT32 does not, such as access permissions. IIRC, accessing the file tables is slower on large FAT32 partitions than large NTFS partitions.

As a closing comment.. why is everyone so focused on HD speed? HD's are slow, end of story. For a personal compouter, if it takes 20 seconds, or 10 seconds to transfer 500MB wont matter really.

Same reason people care about main memory speeds, which are also slow (often as much as 100 times slower than an L1 cache). In performance tests you can show that 90-99% of the time data is being accessed from a cache rather than from main memory or a harddrive. However when you do need to transfer data from somewhere other than the cache you want it to be as quick as possible.

If a program loads a piece of data and then uses it, the second instruction must wait until the data has been loaded before it can be executed. If the data is on a harddrive, then you could be waiting several hundred clock cycles before you can do anything. This is why harddrive/memory speeds are important and why caching is such a big deal in modern computers.

[Z!re]

If a program loads a piece of data and then uses it, the second instruction must wait until the data has been loaded before it can be executed. If the data is on a harddrive, then you could be waiting several hundred clock cycles before you can do anything. This is why harddrive/memory speeds are important and why caching is such a big deal in modern computers.

Ofcourse, but we're not talking time critical nuclear reactor computers here.. we're talking some kids home computer in the bedroom.. that he plays some games on..

I used to play Doom 3 on an 800mhz 256mb ram computer, it played fine, and trust me, it used tones of HD caching.. the HD used was some old 16gb HD..

All I'm saying is that HD access speed depend on other stuff than your filesystem, FAT32 or NTFS really doesent make that big of a difference compared to the res of your system.