NTFS or FAT32

[Guest]

I am about to upgrade my system with a XP2400 processor, ASUS A7N8X Deluxe board and 1 Gb PC2700 of memory. I will be keeping my two Maxtor HDD's 60 & 40 GB ATA 100's but going to Windows XP instead of ME. Which file system would you recommend NTFS or FAT 32. I know NTFS is more secure but are there any performance issues - good or bad?Cheers

[pacosancas 0]

Hi,If you are going to format the drives, I'd recommend going for NTFS, which is more robust in terms of tolerance to failures: since I did it, I never again got any scandisk informing of cross-linked things or similar failures when rebooting after a BSOD (blue screen of death). Also, I believe that XP will refuse to format FAT32 any partition larger than 32Gb. If you are going to keep the content of your disks and convert them to NTFS, I've heard that it will perform worse in term of disk access. I did it, and I've noticed that start-up of some programs takes longer, but once started I notice no performance hit due to disk access. For example, my image thumbnail program now takes ages to read the contents of a folder to display the thumbnails, but once the folder is accessed once, it performs faster when accessing each incividual file (eg. when doing a slideshow). FS2002 also takes longer to start up, but no noticeable performance hit afterwards (I have 1Gb ram)PacoStultorum numerus infinitus est.

[Guest danowat]

Hi,Well if you are not going to have to access your drives from dos or use any dos programs then NTFS is the way to go.It is supposed to be quicker and it has the added advantage of being able to compress with little or no preformance loss.It is also the best file system XP, but you can't go back from NTFS and 9x or ME can't read NTFS disks.Dan.

[Guest]

I personally prefer FAT32 (using Win2kPro SP2 with SCSI RAID0)...but keep in mind if you use NTFS that drefrags occur VERY quickly and the MTF table data (specific to NTFS) will also get messy pretty quick. Just get a good 3rd party defragger that can optimize these system files and do it regularly and you should be a-okay. I use PerfectDisk...