FAT32 vs. NTFS
This is for advice and will give points to multiple advisors. Have 1 20gig HD and 1 40gig HD. Partitioned the comp when I installed the 40gig drive so that I now have 3 20gig partitions. All of these partitions are FAT32. I have Partition Magic 6.0 and am considering adding/moving the partitions and changing to NTSF. I do a lot of large graphics work and work with some very large .avi, .mp3 and .mpeg files. Is it adviseable to change to the NTSF and add another partition for some very sensitive material or is it just best to leave well enough alone. I'm posting here because the advice is far superior to the "newsgroups". Thanks for your help, as usual.
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One last comment...........I do have a dual-boot system with Win98SE and Win2000 Pro. Will Windows XP overwrite Win98SE or is a complete uninstall of 98 necessary because I just purchased XP so that I can have XP and 2000 Pro as the 2 OS's. Thank you for your responses.
You should be able to upgrade 98 with XP Cactus, just pay attention to the instructions as they come up.
>>because I just purchased XP
You just purchased XP?? Where? It's not available yet.
You just purchased XP?? Where? It's not available yet.
If you're dealing with REALLY large files (over 2GB or even over 4GB), it's a MUST to use NTFS. FAT32 does not support files this large:
FAT16: file 2 gigabytes, partition 2 gigabytes
FAT32: file 4 gigabytes, partition 64 gigabytes
NTFS: file 2 terrabytes, partition 16 exabytes (18.4 x 10^18 bytes)
FAT16: file 2 gigabytes, partition 2 gigabytes
FAT32: file 4 gigabytes, partition 64 gigabytes
NTFS: file 2 terrabytes, partition 16 exabytes (18.4 x 10^18 bytes)
Hope this helps,
http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2433123-6,00.html
and
http://www.itp-journals.com/dual_boot_Windows_2000_page2.htm
Cheers,
T.
http://www.zdnet.com/products/stories/reviews/0,4161,2433123-6,00.html
and
http://www.itp-journals.com/dual_boot_Windows_2000_page2.htm
Cheers,
T.
ASKER
GOOD........as usual!
Glad I could help!
NTFS is also a better performer on large hard disks due to a directory system that is designed from the beginning to handle large drives. I recall that the maximum disk size that NTFS can support is in the EXABYTE range. That's 1 EB = 1000 GB. So there is still some room to grow...
NTFS is also more robust in the area of recovery. It performs much better in the event of system crash or failure.
dew_assoc is correct that lower cost tools are available to recover data from FAT32 but I've yet to have a need to use recovery on an NTFS system. So my advice is to scrap FAT32 and use NTFS exclusively, EXCEPT if you are needing to dual-boot and run Win9x.