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NTFS Versus Fat32

Microsoft offers two options for formatting your hard drive. Which one should you use?

By David Prager

Q: Can you explain the pros and cons of Fat 32 and NTFS?

-- Lars from Central City, Colorado via email

A: Choosing your computer's file system. Not one of life's greatest challenges or most philosophical dilemmas, yet a preponderance that shouldn't be taken lightly in the world of computers.

The decision isn't really all that difficult and here's why. If you're using the latest Windows operating systems (Windows 2000, Windows XP), use NTFS. Here are just some of the qualities of NTFS that FAT32 and FAT16 lack:

File security
Access rights can be assigned to files and directories, allowing users full access, partial access or no access at all to data on the hard disk.

Encryption
NTFS can automatically encrypt and decrypt file data as it is read and written to the disk

Disk compression
File and directory compression can be performed without using any third party software, which saves space, while still allowing for transparent access and operation to the user.

Support for large hard disks
We're talking very large. Try a theoretical limit of 16 Exabytes, and up to 2 Terabytes.

File names
Native support of long file names and a 16-bit character standard called Unicode (likely the next generation ASCII)

Storage quotas
Disk quotas can be assigned that limit the amount of disk space users can access on a partition.

Sparse files
Let the user assign and reserve hard disk space to specific files.

File streams
Support for multiple data streams.

Fault tolerance
An enhanced ability to seamlessly respond to unexpected hardware and software errors.

If you want to make the computer a multi-boot system, you might want to consider FAT32, but you don't have to go with it.

If you're concerned about being able to see files across partitions, you should make the shared partitions FAT32.

For more details about the difference between NTFS and Fat32, read these Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:

Overview of FAT & NTFS File Systems
Limitations of the FAT32 in Windows XP