FAT32 vs. NTFS
 

I just noticed that both of my drives were formatted in FAT32 and not NTFS. They are 40 and 80 gigs, respectively. (I have a external 160 but that is NTFS) I was under the impression that a drives of this size needed to be NTFS and not FAT32. True or false? When does a drive, due to its size, need to formated in NTFS? Thanks again.

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

Excellent comparison page. Funny.. I had to look this page up for a mate about 2 hours ago.

When I installed my 120 Gig.. it only let me use NTFS.. not bad tho, NTFS is much better on compression among other things.

NTFS seems to also be a little more stable. One thing that is nice about NTFS is the max file size. If you do any work with DVD image files, you need NTFS so you can have a file > 4GB (4.7). If you have XP/2000, try this command from a command prompt:

convert c: /fs:ntfs

This will convert the drive from fat to NTFS.

NTFS is deffinetly the way to go, in my opinion. Way more stable than FAT32. And im not sure of this or not ( no quantative evidence ) but the overall response time is way better for moving files and other similiar operations.

I was looking at that page in the "performance" section. What's a "small" volume that NTFS would be slow for?

nothing but NTFS for all three of my win-based system. Forget what filesystem the knoppix box is using.

Good question, not sure :)

NTFS is supposed to make more efficient use of your disk space for just about any partition over about 450 MB. Less than that and the overhead involved makes FAT32 the better choice.

That's also the reason you can't have an NTFS 1.4MB floppy disk, the extra stuff required by the file system to make permissions, encryption etc work is more than the capacity of the disk itself.

/WIN2000 MCSA, bored at work.